[TAG] LG 127 Wifi

[Benjamin A. Okopnik]

On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 10:52:28AM -0600, jeff at jeffroot.us wrote:
> Hello, again;
> 
>   > There's rarely an imperative to adapt yourself to someone's broken
>   > crapola
> 
>   This appears to be exactly the problem.  On my way to Worldcon, I
>   tested the open wifi at the Salt Lake City airport: I get an IP
>   address just fine.  I was supposed to just "open the internet
>   browser" (according to the announcement), and get the welcome page
>   for their system.  For some reason, this didn't work (I got
>   "document contains no data" from Firefox).  But I got the IP address
>   just fine, so I'm calling this a different problem.

Yep, it's an application-level problem now. If it was below that,
Firefox would have reported something like "Unable to connect", instead.
 
>   One interesting thing; when I fired up the card with "any" essid, I
>   did NOT get the Hilton's network.  And I've been sniffing around
>   with Kismet, and finding several other wifi networks.  I'm going to
>   have to think about this a bit; I don't think connecting to just
>   anything is really what I want.

You can specify the channel you want with 'iwconfig', if I recall
corectly; that gives you the AP that you prefer.

>   > little-to-no useful education in it. I'd look for another coffee
>   > shop.
> 
>   I disagree.  If I had never seen this coffee shop, I'd have never
>   heard of Zeroconf.  I'd have gone on thinking wifi under Linux "just
>   works".  I would never have been motivated to run tcpdump and watch
>   DHCP do its thing.

Jeff, you clipped too much of what I'd said and lost the context as a
result. I didn't say that you should have *never* tried to use that
coffee shop; what I'm saying is that, once you discovered that their
setup was broken, contorting yourself to fit their straitjacket
(particularly when you're uncertain of how well your own system is
working) makes no sense. If you want to do effective testing of your
wireless, you need a simple, working, _compliant_ wireless AP; trying to
connect two unknowns is a recipe for lots of self-imposed pain.

>   But I think we can call this problem solved.

Excellent!

>  I believe the sources of my problem were:
> 
>   1) not knowing how to configure /etc/network/interfaces for an open
>      wifi
> 
>   2) finding several local hotspots that are poorly configured

Agreed.
 
>   2) other machines that have worked with these hotspots are running
>      the latest KDE, which includes the zeroconf code

I hadn't realized that; interesting.
 
>   As I mentioned above, I think I've learned a few things about what's
>   really going on, and more importantly, about how to troubleshoot the
>   wifi system when it doesn't work.  I made an offer to Ben that if
>   the Gang would help me troubleshoot this, I'd write it up for the
>   Gazette.
> 
>   Once Worlddon is over, I'll see if Zeroconf will conquer the local
>   hotspot.  Regardless, I'll write up what I've learned, and hopefully
>   someone else will benefit from this.

That sounds really great, Jeff; I'm looking forward to seeing it!


* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *