xbox finally on the net

A while back I got a modded xbox from a friend of mine, which is awesome. One of the apps from the mod, xbox media center, has loads of nice little abilities like playing music or videos off samba servers, or copying games over via FTP and so on. However, my xbox is nowhere near an ethernet cable when it's downstairs, and I have no TV or RCA input devices up in my room (yet!) So, what we've had to do is take either mine or dad's laptop into the living room, run a long enet cable, and do net sharing, which sort of sucks and is a pain to get working properly, esp. if you want other devices on the LAN to see it, or for it to see the internet.

But today, that all changed...

While cleaning, I came across my Linksys WGA11B. This thing is more or less an over glorified wifi-b to 10baseT ethernet bridge. I got it many years ago (read: wifi-b era) from a friend of mine who thought it was broken, but in reality had just lost the power supply. In attempt to "fix" it, he removed the case, which left me with a board and antenna, which was just enough. However, I never had a powersupply for it. Today however when cleaning when I found it, I had the thought to try it because I actually had a machine for it, the xbox. After a bit of digging I found a generic 12v AC adapter, and hooked it up. The lights lit right up and I had no idea what to do.

A short trip to the linksys support website later, I was downloading the setup application and reading manual PDFs. Basically, you plug this thing directly to you computer via ethernet, you run the application, you enter in your settings, and hit save. As long as you don't press the reset button, you're fine. The main disadvantage to this is that I had to move the wifi-net to WEP from WPA2, so that's been a little bumpy. Other than that it works great and I can now access the xbox whenever, without having to do weird computer crap.