Re: flakey wifi access
On Mon, 30 Jun 2014 06:39:29 -0400
ken <gebser@mousecar.com> wrote:
> On 06/29/2014 10:50 PM tom arnall wrote:
> > my wicd agent is unable to connect to wifi at mcDonald's, both in
> > mexico and the states. it's fine with my home wifi and the coffee
> > shop i go to. it also fails on the network at the campus where i
> > teach in mexico.
>
> "Unable to connect" can mean a lot of things. I recently had a wifi
> connection problem which, using 'ping', I determined to be caused by
> a lot of packets being dropped-- like 30 - 60% of them. I found that
> ping will return a response in some cases even when it seems there is
> no connection. You'll need to find out the IP address of the access
> point (AP). If your system doesn't tell you this, you might ask some
> other user. Get rates from all APs, working and non-working, and
> compare them.
>
> Another utility to use is tcpdump. This will provide very detailed
> information about the packets constituting the connection attempt.
>
> And iwlist will provide info on the available APs. Noting the
> relative signal strengths and protocols used and other details might
> point to patterns.
>
>
You can try to go the "manual" way to see if you get better results:
-bring up your wireless interface, if it s not already up
'ifconfig' (if it doesn't appear here, means it is not up)
'ifconfig -a' (you should see it here, as this command lists all the
available physical interfaces on your machine. Then)
'ifconfig WIRELESS-INTERFACE-NAME up' (to bring it up).
-Then, once up, you can, as ken said, use iwlist to know about the AP
in your vicinity
'iwlist scan'
You should see mac-donald's AP essid name in the list you get from
iwlist.
-Finally, for mac-donalds, I saw on their page they re isn't any
encryption and password to connect to their AP, so you just need to run
'iwconfig WIRELESS-INTERFACE-NAME essid MACDO-ESSID-NAME'
and then dhclient to get an IP(with the -v flag to be sure you
obtained an IP address)
'dhclient -v WIRELESS-INTERFACE-NAME'
-Finally_2, open your browser and you should see mac-do HP,
and a 'connect' button to connect from there.
There is a detailed explanation to connect manually on crunchbang,
under the three main methods (no password and no encryption, or WEP or
WPA). Here is the link
http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=16624
Also, you might have to use 'sudo' for all those commands as you need
to be the root user to run them.
Also_2, stop all the other wifi-network-related daemons as they might
get in the way when you try to config manually(wicd and others if you
have).
HTH
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