If you're like me then you don't like to run wires all over the house to connect your home network. It is often easier to simply use wireless throughout most of the home. That is, until you want to connect devices that don't have wireless capabilities. In my case, I have a desktop computer which does not have a wireless card. Instead of buying a wireless card for the desktop, I decided to configure an old access point to work as a wireless bridge instead.
The wireless AP / bridge which I own is a TrendNET 638. In order to configure this device, like many wireless devices, you need to connect to it's default static IP. The device does ship with a CD for Windows which makes this process easier, but I am using Ubuntu and I lost the CD. So, in order to connect to the devices static IP you first need to know the static IP. If you don't know the IP, then your first task should be to find it. I was able to get the TrendNET 638's static IP by looking in the devices user guide which is still available on their website, fortunately. The static IP address is 192.168.10.100.
Knowing the IP, now I need to change my computer IP so that I can connect to the device. From the little I know about networking, I remembered that the computer has to be on the same subnet as the device it is trying to connect to. (Please correct me if I am using the term subnet incorrectly here.) In my case I needed to manually set my network IP to 192.168.10.50. It really doesn't matter that I used .50 in this case as long as it isn't .100 which is the same as the device. By setting my IP to 192.168.10.50 I am put on the same subnet as the device and I can now connect to the device by going to my browser and entering 192.168.10.100.
Here is a short video to show how to manually configure a static IP in Ubuntu 10.10 to connect to the TrendNET 638 wireless AP.