I changed my iChat account settings to use port 443 for AIM and gmail.com Jabber, and now they're both working again."

Bailing wire and tape

Being engineers, users quickly got creative on their own to improve their wireless connectivity.

"There was no WiFi signal when on the desk in front of the window in my room, but after some experiments, I discovered that the signal was quite good... on the ceiling of the bathroom," emailed Marc Petit-Huguenin.

"I have a Nexus S phone, so I taped it on the ceiling of the bathroom, and used tethering over Bluetooth to bridge the gap to the desk," he explained. This is a slow connection, but good enough to send emails over SMTP or use vi [the popular Unix text editor] over SSH."