well I decided to go Ethernet (and I know nothing) - it was easy.
so this is what I have.
dsl from phone line to dsl modem
from there to a cheap linksys router 4 port (70 bucks when I got it last week)
from there to a cheap 10/100 4 port auto sense switch (40 bucks, noisy fan)
plugged into that I have a win98, a winXP and the riocar (2.0.11beta, no hijack yet)

the router does the DHCP and NAT thingies (right out of the box, remember I know nothing about networks)

so I fired up the machine that had emplode on it and told it to use the network, not the USB. it takes a little longer to find the riocar but works perfectly. then I installed emplode on my other computer and was very happy to find that it worked there too. this is just too good.

I'm really no pro, very very green at this. but for all of you that might be wanting Ethernet to your riocar and have not because it looks yukky....give it a shot.
I used all the defaults. I just worked. I got lucky.

however- if you have kids....
just to mess with me after I told my kids how happy I was, my 12 year old daughter unplugged the dsl modem from the wall just to show me I 'wasn't all that'.
only took me 20 minutes to figure it out.

my 12 year old daughter unplugged the dsl modem from the wall just to show me I 'wasn't all that'. only took me 20 minutes to figure it out.

ROFL, right on.

Heh. It doesn't just happen to rookies. I was a cussin' and a swearin' for a good several hours one night when my DSL cut out on me. I went through all my pppoe config stuff, went through my firewall setup, etc. It wasn't until I went to call tech support that I discovered that my cats had knocked the phone line out of the plug while roughhousing...

Hi.

Something similar happened to me lately.

I literally installed miles of network cable and hundreds of routers and switches, but well, you will never be perfect...

Some weeks ago, I had a small network gaming party (just 6 players) at home. After the party, my DSL connection still worked, but only on the PPPOE host/firewall itself, not on any other computer on the net. In fact, all my computers could see each other, but none could reach the firewall. It took me hours of wading through the firewall config, system logs and other things, I even checked all the cables twice. Then, after being ready to give up and finally having some breakfast (at 5pm, I stood up at 10am), I remembered that I had the switch for the gaming network connected to the firewall while playing, and suddenly remembered I had to put the long network cable (50 meters) into the uplink port of the switch, instead of the normal host ports, and after the games finished, I just put the original cable in that very same port. Well, after switching the original cable from the uplink port to a normal host port, my network miraculously started working again.

cu,
sven

You know, its stuff like this that causes stupid questions when you call tech support. How much time have I spent assuring tech support people I know how to run a computer before they finally answer my question? The worst part is just as I'm getting really frustrated, they ask me a obvious question I didn't think of that of course solves the problem. Then I slap my head and try to figure out how to gracefully hang up and still sound like I knew that already.

I guess tech people have the "forest for the trees" problem when it compes to PCs, because at my new job the developers (well, the other developers thankfully) have to provide help desk support and the worst calls are always the "power" users who know something about PC's. Then there are the unmanagable users who actually have worked with databases before. . .

No, you are better off as a rookie, I'm sure I would have spent more than 20 min before I figured out the DSL was unplugged.

You know, its stuff like this that causes stupid questions when you call tech support. How much time have I spent assuring tech support people I know how to run a computer before they finally answer my question?

Doing desktop support was easier then server support in this regard. Most people on the desktop side would actually check things. I can't count the number of times I've had to tell people "Go check this first, I need to know for sure before replacing this part" on the server side.