A fix for Windows Vista not connecting to a wireless network

Today my girlfriend's laptop (running Windows Vista) would not connect to my wireless network. It connected to her uni wireless network fine and was connecting to mine fine up until now. It had recently been upgraded to Service Pack 2, so this may have triggered the problem.

I unsuccessfully tried

• rebooting,
• removing the access point from its list of 'remembered' points, and
• reinstalling the wireless card driver.

After some Googling the solution that worked for me was to create a new 32-bit DWORD value called ArpRetryCount in:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\

and leaving its value at 0. After rebooting it connected as normal.

Here is a .reg file to automatically apply the fix.

Installing the Passenger gem on Ubuntu

I just tried to install Passenger on my Ubuntu-based Linode. I like to use the gem (as opposed to distro packages) to make sure I keep up with new version releases. Unfortunately when I tried I got this error:

# gem install passenger
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing passenger:
        ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb install passenger
extconf.rb:8:in `require': no such file to load -- mkmf (LoadError)
        from extconf.rb:8

Since the machine is a VPS I like to try and keep the number of unnecessary packages down to a minimum. It turns out the only extra package I needed to install was ruby1.8-dev.

After Passenger built successfully, I had to add /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin into my $PATH and run passenger-install-apache2-module (which contained cushy step-by-step instructions from that point on).