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On Fri, 28 May 2010, Neil Winchurst wrote:
Gordon Henderson wrote:Sounds like somethings wrong... Have you used Wi-Fi on that laptop before? Do you have any other "proper" device to use to test the access point? (Yes, I know, Linux is proper, but let's face it - it's not had the best reputation for working Wi-Fi. I'll always resort to using a mobile phone with Wi-Fi or a Windows box to check a Wi-Fi access point if I can't get my laptop to work). Of-course my current mobile phone runs linux, but at least the hardware is well understood - getting a decent driver for the multitude of Wi-Fi cards is half the problem... GordonYes, I used wifi on that laptop with my now replaced router. But I had encryption turned off. Now that I have replaced the router I thought I ought to try some form of encryption. That is when my troubles started. If I turn off encryption on the new router that same laptop works fine, just as it did with the previous router (with no encryption). It will not connect however with encryption turned on. Turn encryption off again and it is all fine.
Sounds like your distro or hardware doesn't support the encryption - or maybe it's done in software and you don't have the drivers? It's an area of Linux networking I'm not as familiar with as others - I suspect I've just been lucky and also made sure I used hardware that didn't need the wrapped windows drivers. (ndis or whatever it's called).
I have had issues with wicd in the past though - when it was set to automatically connect to my home network, it would never connect to the Shoreline - and last time I was there, I nuked all the config files and started from scratch - and it connected to the shoreline, but then wouldn't connect to my home network...
Go down to WEP encryption and see if you can make that work, then add in MAC authentication - it's still fairly trivial to crack if you know how, but it's better than nothing.
Also - be in the same room as the access point when doing the testing - there's no point being in a marginal signal area when you have other uncertianties, and going back to even more basics, see if your access point has a scanner to see which channels are already in-use in your area and pick one well away - but avoid channels 12 and 13 as some drivers won't see it due to country restrictions. (But they're good to use if you can as others rarely do) Remember that a Wi-Fi channel spans 2 channels either side, so a base station on channel 4 is using the spectrum between channels 2 and 6. (Channel 1 will use the equivalent of -1 through 3, and so on)
Putting an access point on channel one, and having one next door on channel 2 really isn't going to help things.
I don't know what scanners are avalable for Linux these days - (I might now have a look!), but I have a brilliant graphical one for my phone an I can see right now what's about me...
See: http://unicorn.drogon.net/Screenshot-20100528-092405.png for a screenshot of my phone.So my access points are on channels 4 and 13. (Yes, I have 2), but look at channel 1: There are 3 there, channel 7 has 2 and channel 11 has 2, so by putting mine in the middle and top, I get more clear signal space.
Wish I'd had that tool 7 years ago when I was building Wi-Fi broadband networks... The equivalent was several thousand pounds worth of signal analyser...
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html