If at first you don’t succeed

I have these Linksys Velop Wi-Fi repeater units at the office …. or rather had. Because everyone has an iPhone or a streaming thing, or some sort of device I have a separate external Wi-Fi that goes out our secondary Internet connection. We do this to isolate all of the “Internet of things” from our main business network.  Normally it works perfectly but every now and then you have to reboot it… or as I call it “hang on folks, I have to reboot the cloud”.  So the other day it had little red icons at the top of each unit indicating it was having issues and would not reboot/reconnect no matter what I did.  I even moved it around temporarily to another Internet connection we had and still no go.  Finally I did what I normally do when I get so frustrated with technology, I went to Office depot and bought a similar product and replaced it.

Sometimes with technology you just give up and buy something else to fix your problem.

Mind you while I was at the office I had even tried resetting the devices back to factory default to set them back up again and they would not hook into the Linksys set up at all.  As an aside if you don’t have a cell phone these days, you pretty much are not setting up any Wi-Fi repeater/router/whatever-er these days as they ALL depend on having an app on the phone to walk you through the process.  The instruction book has 47 languages that all say “start by downloading the app called…… and then follow the instructions”.  No written manual these days EVERYTHING is online.  Remember the days of Novell when you had MANUALS?  Ah but I digress in my story.

So I was about to chuck them out into e-waste and I was like …hang on I have the same model at home I can always take them home and try to reset it there when I’m more calm and not in a mood.

Meanwhile other weird stuff started occurring with that Internet connection and I had to totally reboot the Internet modem – taking the battery backup out of it because it wouldn’t turn off by merely pulling the plug. So finally realizing that my issue all along was probably was a problem with the Comcast modem that hasn’t been rebooted in eons (you tend not to reboot office Internet connections until you REALLY have to), I take my three Linksys Velo towers home and try to set them up as additional repeater stations at home since I have the exact same model.

Still, they will not connect.  The phone is sitting right next to the tower and it keeps saying it can’t connect to it. So then I go…. hmmmmm… I’ve had this issue before where slightly older technology will not get connected to existing equipment using my fully patched up to date iPhone.  EVEN THOUGH I have followed the instructions to allow access on the local network as the application set up instructions tell me to do. So I pull out my out of date, no longer getting updates from Google android/Vintage Samsung tablet, download the Linksys application and see if by using an older device that I can get the tower connected.

Sure enough, it connects immediately with no problem whatsoever.

The moral of this story? As much as I urge people to never use out of date devices as they may put you at risk, keep one around for setting up tech.  This is now the fourth time I’ve had to use an older ipad or an older android device to set something up because all of my newer iPhones and iPads kept fighting me and would not complete the onboarding process of whatever geek thing I was trying to set up.