I messed around a bit with my network tonight, in order to set set up my Ethernet-over-power (AKA Powerline Networking), and I figured out some things which, while they may not be useful to many of you, this is a bit of a prompt for the next time around.
1) The manager application runs under Windows only (although apparently, there are github repositories where you can get and build a linux application which even lets you set QoS aka Quality Of Service and other such fun things – I’ve not tried them, so I can’t recommend them). If you’ve got more than a matched pair of these, then you’ll need to run the application. I didn’t try running it in a virtual machine – I kept the supplied Windows OS from when I bought this machine specifically for purposes like this.
2) Not all models reset in the same way. If you can’t get them all to reset, connect to them with a CAT5 cable, go to the “Privacy” tab, select “Public network” which will reset it to “PowerLineAV”, and then select “Local computer”. You should then be able to browse across them all.
3) Not all models come with a “password” (sometimes referred to as a DEK). In this case, you also have to plug into these devices to set up their security. If they do have a password, it’ll be entirely in upper case, and even though the application shows numeric characters, in the 4 devices I received, they were all alphabetic-only strings of 16 characters, separated by hyphens.
4) Once you’ve got them all set to “PowerLineAV”, typed the passwords in for the models which have them, you can now set a community wide network password. This could be used to set up several logical segments, but realistically, it’s going to be one flat network :)
I can’t think, offhand, of anything else I need to say right now, but it’s been pretty interesting setting this up, so… hope you enjoyed it!
