Debug Enable!

All wireless functions on my O2 wireless box II appear to have died overnight. This is a problem for me because I use wireless all the time... to stream music to my Apple TV, to surf the Internet from my laptop, and play games on my iPod Touch. The wired ethernet is still happily routing packets between my LAN and the Internet. So I climbed up in my cupboard and pulled down the old Netgear DG834G - what a beautiful beast. It runs BusyBox, an embedded Linux operating system and you can connect to it using any telnet client. Just navigate to http://<netgear-router>/setup.cgi?todo=debug from your browser first, and you're A for Away - you can then telnet into it. Reboot the rooter when you're finished to disable the telnet server until next time.

Things that frustrated me:
There was no way to change the default gateway address handed out by either router. I suspect I could have done so with the Netgear box in time, but there is no text editor in the distribution.

To get my network back up and running would be difficult without the usual trance music coming through the Apple TV; keeping me focused. Still, I needed to:

1. put both routers onto the same subnet
   
2. keep DHCP running on the O2 box (so that the default gateway would remain the O2 box address)
   
3. turn off DHCP on the Netgear box (otherwise it would give out its own IP address as default gateway)
   
4. turn off the wireless interface on the O2 box for good
   

In a nutshell:
o2wirelessbox is now 192.168.1.254/24 with DHCP handing out addresses in the range 64-253
netgear is now 192.168.1.1/24 with disabled DHCP (I would have liked to use the range 2-63)