I got a new wireless router/firewall thingy this morning. Various reasons. Long story.

Anyways, got it home, plugged it in. Restarted wireless networking on my laptop, and got onto the admin pages. Logged in, and started changing all the configuration options to what I wanted. Once I had it all configured, I started testing the port forwarding settings, and realized that nothing was working the way that I thought it was.

After trying various things, I decided to do a factory reset, and start again. I unplugged it, and noticed that my wireless signal strength didn’t drop at all. Turns out I had been configuring some neighbor’s gateway.

So, the moral of this story, folks, is that you need to change your SSID and your password when you get a wireless gateway. Yeah, I know, they are supposed to just plug in, turn on, and Just Work, but, come on.