[vox-tech] Wireless problem

[Ken Bloom]

On Monday 05 June 2006 22:07, Richard Harke wrote:
> I bought a wireless access point and it works fine with windows,
> to my wife's laptop, and to my laptop with either the built-in
> (Broadcom) or a PCMCIA card (Netgear prism54)
> After a lot of effort, I have the card coming up, (driver loading,
> firmware loading) but I still can't pass traffic over it. I found the
> docs on wireless extension in the interfaces file and it looks like
> every thing is loading OK. iwconfig shows the right key and essid.
> ifconfig shows the right IP address. The route table enteries are
> just the same for eth1 (wifi)  as for eth0 (ethernet) Except
> different IP address. I can't ping my other machine on the local net.
> I tried the ping in the other direction, to the IP address I gave
> to eth1 my that is no-go also. All the error counts are zero.
> The only real clue seems to be a message in dmesg:
>  no IPV6 routers But why doesn't it use IPV4? i don't see
> any config variables for this.

The first thing to check is that your signal is strong enough. But I'm 
sure you did that.

I recently reconfigured(!) the DHCP server in my university library. I 
couldn't connect (and was getting some kind of network error -- I don't 
recall specifically what it said), so I got the librarian to get me a 
tech guy. We fiddled with the laptop using various IP address settings 
that he knew the DHCP server was supposed to be giving me, and we found 
the answer -- the DHCP was giving me a gateway address that wasn't in 
the subnet (or more accurately, it was giving me the wrong subnet 
mask). So he ssh'ed in and opened the config file for the DHCP server, 
and I told him what to change.

But this situation sounds fairly unique, so I don't think my solution 
will help you.

But you should try looking at other standard tools to try to get an idea 
of what's going on, such as the route command.

In another situation with an off-the-shelf WAP, I had to reconfigure the 
key on the WAP, because the WAP gave me a choice between open and 
shared. It was set to one, when I really needed the other to be able to 
connect.

Once again, another war story which may or may not help you.

The moral of the story. Check that your WAP is configured correctly too.

--Ken

-- 
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