fixing the wireless access point

my linksys wrt54g hasn't been working well lately, thanks to neighbors who just pop up their own networks without checking which channels are already being used. my problem is that i'm not using the gateway/dhcp features of the linksys, since i already had a lan on 10.0.0.x. so i couldn't log in to the linksys' web admin page. here's how i fixed it: with kismet, i determined that channels 1, 6, 9, and 11 were being used within range of my house. a little scanning the neighborhood picked up channel 3, too. channels 1-11 are legal in north america, according to /etc/conf.d/wireless.example. so i'm going to use channel 4. i got into the default linksys network by booting the wap unplugged from ethernet starting my eth1 on the same channel, with dhcp. my wireless ip was then 192.168.1.101. http://192.168.1.1/ got me to the admin page for the linksys. default username and password are 'admin' and 'admin'. once i was in, i turned off the dhcp server. (apparently things got turned back on from a reset.) pretty simple menu navigation to change the channel settings and get security back. i used a wep passphrase. (i seem to recall it was too much hassle to use wpa with linux before, and i don't think any of my neighbors are very 1337, given their ignorant clobbering of my network in the first place.) 128 bit, 26 hex digits conveniently generated by linksys. had to reboot linksys and restart eth1 (with manual ip now that dhcp is off) after changing the channel and turning on wep. reset the password under the administration tab, changed the ip to 10.0.0.101, and rebooted linksys. after a couple of minutes, i could log into web admin again. no more messing around with 192.168! hooray! something odd that i noticed was that the wireless card kept wanting to use the old channel 6, even though i set channel_eth1="4" in /etc/conf.d/net. the only workaround i could find was to take out the channel_eth1 line and let it choose the channel automatically by the essid. this worked as long as i was connecting only to the linksys, without dhcp. once i plugged the linksys into the lan and used the dhcp server on my dsl modem, it would still report using channel 6. but it worked. weird.