In addition to my recent hardware problems, a few days ago my router decided to stop cooperating. It was an old Linksys BEFSR81 that we’ve had for about five years now. It took me a while to decide it was the router that was causing us all our grief but a friend’s help and advice nailed it’s coffin shut for me. We ended up giving our wireless router (a Linksys WRT54GS) a promotion to serve as the main router coming into our house as well as our wireless access point.

We have one of those On-Q panels at home and unfortunately, because the wireless router only has four wired ports we also needed to add a small switch to the panel for the other 4 remaining drops. LiberatorsThis required plugging in another device to our power strip which luckily had one opening left but it was obstructed because of how large the other adapters were. That’s when my friend suggested using Liberators. I had never seen these before but they’re basically foot-long extension cords which make it possible to use every socket in a power strip. Genius. Highly recommended.

Everything’s happy network wise once again at home. I wanted to thank Brian for all his help debugging the networking problems we were experiencing and for recommending the Liberators. Thanks man!