Now that my battery is nicely charged up, I wanted to connect to the iDS to get the 2.5 update.

However, I just can't get it to work.

I'm using a wired connection, with no proxy. When I press Test, I can see the light on my hub come on showing that the Iliad's ethernet port has turned on.

However, after a while of "Searching" it gives up, saying it was Unsuccessful.

The problem is there's no information to tell me whether it got an address via DHCP (why oh why did they not allow setting of a static address?!) and can't find the server, or whether it's not even getting an address.

Can anyone give me an idea how I might resolve this?

Unfortunately, my crappy Linksys router that's providing the DHCP server doesn't seem to log very much of anything, so I can't be sure whether it's receiving a request for an addresss or not.

Of course, I'll bet all this stuff is fixed in 2.5 ... but, it's a bit hard to do anything when you can't connect :-).

I wish iRex had provided a means to just download the update via any means, copy it to the device and then be able to initiate the installation. That would make life so much easier in situations like this.

Can anyone give me an idea how I might resolve this?

Sniff on the net, if you can: you'll see the DHCP requests, and, from the lack of any responses or repeats, you can probably deduce if they were accepted or not. WireShark usually does the job.

You have, of course, entered the password you got when you registered?

harryo, I agree with ath. If you can, sniff the connection. It's not for the faint-hearted though... TadW provided some instruction (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7091).

Sniff on the net, if you can: you'll see the DHCP requests, and, from the lack of any responses or repeats, you can probably deduce if they were accepted or not. WireShark usually does the job.

You have, of course, entered the password you got when you registered?

I eventually got the wireless LAN to work. After downloading the pre-2.5 update, the next time I tried to connect, the wireless didn't work, but wired did ... go figure.

This is very temperamental, which is why I think it would be more useful if we could just download the updates on our PCs and have a way to transfer them to the device for installation.

It's been my experience that every time I use something that hides the details from the user like this, it's a pain.

Oh well, I know the iRex developers seem to read their forum pages, so hopefully they'll make all this better over time.

I notice that in 2.5 you can now set a static IP/gateway/DNS, so hopefully it will work better next time I need to download an update.