Boy was I wrong. After fighting RAID-1 (which should be simple), and a grub bootloader that just won't install on the master boot record, I just gave up and I'm going to see if it'll run Ubuntu Desktop. I bet it works fine.

Now, everyone that's never seen a baby pigeon lower your hand.

Notice how few hands are left up? Why is this, you ask? Lacking better scientific evidence, let me explain it by asking two more questions:

Have you ever seen a fat pigeon? Yes? Okay, ever see one so fat it couldn't fly? No?? Of course not!

Pigeons are like amoebas in that they reproduce asexually. You see, when a pigeon reaches a certain size after gorging itself on fattening tourist fare, it splits into two smaller, hungrier pigeons. This is why you see so many at heavily-trafficked tourist destinations like Piazza San Marco in Venice. It also explains that, while you may see a few corpulent pigeons, you'll never see one so morbidly obese that it cannot fly.

Yes, it costs hundreds of dollars more than a comparable PC, and yes, it took three weeks to get here (I could have had parts ordered, shipped, and built in 3-4 days), but by golly, it'll look good. Expect many upcoming blog posts about this experience.

I have no idea to which nipples the reviewer is referring. Too much personal information?

Originally, we determined a single device (there are four routers involved), the final endpoint, was to blame. We know this because if we replaced it with another cheap off-the-shelf home (wireless) router it worked fine.

Cisco technicians confirmed errors in their 12.4-21(a)JA1 firmware that would cause the behavior we are witnessing. So we downgraded the router. Unfortunately, during our troubleshooting, two intermediate routers were upgraded to the 12.4-21(a)JA1 firmware as well. The result was that our endpoint wireless router, despite having the "correct" firmware now, was still exhibiting the same problem as before, but now for a different reason.

Once we realized this, all the odd problems fit together in one beautiful logical grid. This network issue has been a right bugger, and nothing up until now has made much sense. It's offsite, though, and I won't know for sure if this is the solution until later, but my confidence has never been higher.