La Fonera - 45 minutes of madness

Just been trying to get my Fonera router up and running. I live in The Netherlands where you can buy a Fonera on the fon site for about 40 euro. A friend got it for me on eBay though for 11 euro inclusive shipping. Nice.
Of course, many people have got them free :)) Lucky you!

So, anyway, the story of setting up the bloody thing. Well, it's not much of a story, but it goes like this.
I plugged it in and could see NEITHER of the bloody networks. Neither the public nor the private one. I couldn't see it with my laptop, or my girlfriend's VAIO. Not a good sign, and very annoying. I tried attaching it directly to my cable modem, because I originally had it plugged into my existing wireless router, but that didn't help.

I read some stuff online, and managed to logon to 169.254.255.2 where you can see the Fonera admin console after configuring my LAN connection to a fixed IP of 169.254.255.1
Ok, so at least now I knew the thing actually worked.
I then set the IP to a fixed IP address, just in case it was having trouble getting an IP from my router.
But I still couldn't see either of the Fonera's wireless networks!

I then pulled the plug on the Fonera (I wanted to check it was connecting to my router properly, even though this had nothing to do with the fact that I couldn't see the wireless networks) and plugged it back in again.


To cut an already long story short, I could suddenly see both networks clear as day in both laptops. There is absolutely no explanation for this. Even if it was having trouble with the DHCP, I should still have been able to see at very least the Fonera's private wireless network (some users have reported not being able to see the public "FON_AP" network - see this FAQ)

So I think it was just a weird glitch.
Anyway, anyone with the same problem, just try pulling the plug and then plugging it back in. I think that's what did it in the end!