Here’s a simple, sweet palate cleanser for all you hard-working IT professionals who have messy troubleshooting problems.

I’d set up a couple of wireless access points for my parents because they live in a big old brick house, and their router signal wasn’t penetrating throughout everywhere they needed it. Specifically, I set up one in the back room of the house furthest from the router, and one in the living room because they needed a strong signal in there for their Roku. I tried to name the networks the same so that my parents’ devices would switch seamlessly between them, but for some reason the iPad would prefer to stay connected to a faint signal than switch to a stronger one. That was beyond the limits of my IT knowledge (I’m savvy for a Luser, but no expert), so I named the back one “Back-room” and the other one “Living-room”, and fortunately my Mum was more than capable of using the settings menu to switch as needed. I set up the Roku for them and connected it to “Living-room”, and it functioned fine for a number of years.

After those years, the wireless access point in the living room died completely, so I said I’d look at it when I was next there. My mum had told me that they’d switched ISP and their new router was much stronger, so I decided to just reconfigure the Roku to use that. Unfortunately though, my parents had failed to warn me that they’d lost the remote for the Roku, and had been using the remote control app on their phones. Which connect to the Roku over WiFi. Which was now broken.

Hmm. So I found myself in a bit of a pickle. How can I reconfigure the Roku to connect to WiFi when the only way of controlling it is through the WiFi that it isn’t currently connected to?

I thought it was a long shot, but I decided to try swapping the wireless access point from the back room, and renaming it to “Living-room”, and see if the Roku would connect to it automatically. I honestly expected it to fail - how often is a front-facing username important in IT? I assumed (in my completely inexpert way) that there would be some kind of unique identifier for the access point other than its name.

But I tried it, and it worked! I got connected to the Roku, changed its settings to connect to the (now adequate) main WiFi, and then put the access point back where I’d taken it from (after renaming it again, of course).

Is there any better feeling than when a simple solution just works?