Belkin Pre-N Router Review – Part 1

Tech

belkin-pre-n-ap.png

This is the first part of my review of the Belkin Pre-N Wireless Router.

It’s not going to go into too much detail – there are plenty of indepth technical reviews of this product floating around, this is going to be more of a real world example.

First up, getting it up and running was very straightforward. Being an über geek, I dispensed with the automatic setup software and just decided to plug my laptop in and connect to the router’s web interface. As all I needed it to do was be a wireless access point (or bridge), I simply chose the option "access point only" and the Belkin disabled all the routing/NAT/firewall features automatically. I assigned it an IP address for the LAN address on my fixed network, then plugged it into my switch. Now it was just a matter of setting the SSID, WEP keys and MAC address filtering and I was away. Probably 10 minutes at most.

One of my laptops refused point blank to see the network, but it’s been a bit dodgy of late anyway. Amazingly I told Windows XP to "repair" the wireless connection and it sprang into life! My Netgear MP101 music player was also a bit funny – in the end I did a factory reset on it and it too started working.

The reason I dispensed with my old Buffalo APs was their shoddy range. The Belkin is absolutely awesome in this regard. Before, I would get no signal in my bedroom (furthest point away from the AP), or worse still, some signal that would drop out every minute. Now, I get at least 3 out of 5 bars’ strength and the full 11Mbps on my 802.11b wireless card. After I installed a Belkin Pre-N PC Card into my laptop, I got the full speed of 108Mbps and full strength in there – absolutely amazing!

So, from the point of view of easy-of-setup and range it scores pretty highly. However, today (48 hours after installation) I’ve discovered a problem: when attempting to use the 802.11b cards you cannot upload any files via FTP or SMB. With the Belkin PC card in place, it works a charm. Having tried a plethora of different settings and laptops and firmwares, it seems to be an issue with the AP itself. I’ve contacted Belkin technical support in Europe, so fingers crossed they can tell me what the problem is.

Hopefully good news for part 2 of the review then!

 

Adsense

Tech

Maybe or maybe you haven’t noticed the Google ads appearing on the right hand side and at the top of individual archive pages.

It’s just an incentive for me to try and keep this thing updated, and perhaps make the odd cent or two. Go, click if you like. Or not.

Best end of Lamb with Pea Pancakes

Food

I thought it might be nice to give you a recipe I did this evening, but it’s mostly an aide-memoire.

You will need:

  • Best end of lamb
  • Assorted herbs to your liking, e.g. mint, corriander, rosemary
  • 250g of frozen peas (or fresh)
  • 3 tbsp plain flour
  • 3 tbsp double cream
  • 1 egg & 1 egg yolk
  • 50g butter
  • Good quality mustard
  • 5 small plum tomatoes, skinned
  • White wine vinegar
  • Chopped corriander
  • Oil/butter for frying
  • 100-200g grated chedder
  • Cauliflower

For the lamb:

Pre-heat the oven to 200°C.
Ensure you have a nice piece of french trimmed lamb, with the bones at the end cleaned so that it will be easy to slice into individual portions later. Also, remove any fat on the outside of the lamb.
Start by browning off the lamb in the roasting tin on the hob, once this is done, brush the outside with the mustard and sprinkle on the chopped herbs – mint & rosemary are a good combination.
Now put it into the hot oven – around 20 minutes will give you a medium pink middle, 30 minutes will be more well done. Ensure it rests out of the oven for 10 minutes once it’s done.

For the pea pancakes:

Whilst the lamb is cooking, take the fresh or thawed frozen peas and blend together in a liquidizer with the egg and the egg yolk, the flour and the cream. In a griddle, melt the butter until it is nut brown in colour and add that to the blender. Season to taste and blend until smooth.

Drop a small ladle’s worth of the mixture onto a hot griddle brushed with some oil or butter. This quantity will do you around 6-8 pancakes of 80mm in diameter – remember they will spead out on the griddle.

Once done, set onto a wire rack and top off with some small thumb sized floretts of cauliflower that have been quickly blanched in salted boiling water.

Add some of the grated chedder (you could use red lecicester instead) on top.

For the tomato salsa dressing:

Take the skinned and seeded plum tomatoes, and chop into small pieces. Combine with a little white wine vinegar, chopped corriander and optionally some finely chopped red onion.

To assemble:

Quickly flash the pancakes under a hot grill to melt the cheese.
Cut the lamb into individual portions (they’ll look like lamb chops now!).
Plate up the lamb and pancakes and dress with the tomato salsa.

Sharepoint URLs

Tech

Carrying on with the tech theme this week, a small salutary lesson on sharepoint URLs. I am currently the Sharepoint 2003 administrator for my work – it’s a small pilot project for around 200 people at present, but it could get bigger.

Anyway, there’s a lot of stuff "they" don’t tell you when you’re setting it all up; one of those things involves the URLs of subareas that you create. A small example:

  •  Top level page
    • Sub area 1
    • Sub area 2
    • etc.

Sharepoint will kindly create friendly URLs based upon these, so these will appear as:

  • http://sharepoint.mysite.com 
    • http://sharepoint.mysite.com/subarea1
    • http://sharepoint.mysite.com/subarea2
    • etc.

Not so long ago, Sharepoint started putting ugly URLs like http://sharepoint.mysite.com/C1/subarea20 etc. in. It turns there’s a reason that Sharepoint adds in C1, C2, C3… to the URL after a certain amount of time.

Each site can only have a certain number of WSS sites (each subarea is fundamentally one of these, only with fancy wrapping). To get around this, Sharepoint uses so called "bucket sites" – each of the C1, C2 parts is a bucket.

After you create 20 sub areas (doesn’t matter in what hierarchy though), Sharepoint will then move onto the next bucket, C1 and so on.

If you want to preserve your friendly URLs without the bucket site addition (for example, a top level hierarchy in a company), create an admin only accessible area with 20 (less any that you’re using) subareas to reserve the top level URLs. When you need to use them, delete one of the place holder area in your admin area and then immediately create your new "top level" area. Sharepoint will happily reuse any free URLs from the lowest available bucket.

My lesson here – do this before you open Sharepoint to the world, there’s no going back!

TechEd Roundup

Tech

All in all, it was a great week, nice and relaxing despite the fact it was work! So, to sum up some of the most interesting bits for me:
– Some various excellent sessions on Sharepoint, mostly on successful implementation plans and disaster recovery.
– Two fabulous sessions on UNIX/Linux authentication & authorisation with Active Directory (unusual to see *NIX represented at a Microsoft conference!).
– Good news that MOM 2005 SP1 is due out in August, and that it fixes a whole host of problems including DTS jobs for reporting, and the renaming of hosts.
– Oracle products run on Windows. Who would’ve thought it!
– Windows compute cluster edition looks great, it should give all those *NIX solutions a run for their money :)
– Exchange 2003 SP2 adds a whole host of interesting mobile features: ability to wipe remote devices, policy enforcement of PINs etc. A BlackBerry killer if ever I saw one (granted, they’re features that have been copied, but they’re free!!!).
A little late, but still…

TechEd Diary

Tech

So, this week I’m unexpectedly off to TechEd in Amsterdam. Yes, it’s a geek fest of monumental size; mainly geared around those who do MS related stuff in higher education (like me).
Presently I’m sat in poxy Heathrow waiting for my plane, which is now delayed. Hooray BMI. At least I have the miracle of company GPRS and bluetooth on my laptop for company.
Missing the boyfriend already …