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.