For the last few days I’ve been unable to connect to the wireless network at home. My PCMCIA WIFI card had been acting up for a while and finally quit. Annoying, but does give me a good excuse to replace it with one of those internal miniPCI cards for a bit of clutter reduction.

In the meantime, I pulled out an old USB WLAN adapter I had lying around, just to have some sort of connection until I order a new card. Then spent several days having Windows detect the network, only to give a “could not connect” error.

I was weighing up the possibilities, including a full reinstall of the system or the more satisfying option of throwing the computer in front of traffic and saving for something that runs Lightroom and doesn’t suck (AKA a Mac). Things were not looking peachy, to put it mildly.

Then today, I remembered something from a few years ago which turned out to be important. I try to be security conscious and am well aware of the risks involved with a WLAN, apparently when I set the router up sometime back in 2006 I was being very security conscious.

I had MAC address restrictions turned on in the router. Meaning I had told it which specific network cards were allowed to connect. Everything else was a no go (if your name’s not on the list, as the burly dude at the door might say, you don’t get in).

Of course the network adapter I was trying to use was not on the list.

Luckily I had this moment of clarity before I had a chance to nuke and re-install (which would have ended up running into the very same problem anyway).

File this one under “too smart for one’s own good”…