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Note: SuSE 9.1 Pro. Same hardware tested using WXP works fine accessing wireless at same locations. Same hardware also works fine under SuSE for home WLAN. Well, so far, I've made one step forward: I found out why my wireless card would not associate to the public hotspots at places like Borders, Kinko's, etc. When I set up the card (Aironet 350) in YAST, I set up the WEP key for my home WLAN as just one of the available four keys. I also set the AP and ESSID to "any." BUT! Despite this, I wasn't associating to the public hotspot APs, even though I thought I was. I When I was trying to use iwconfig to force the association, I kept getting "interace does not support IP adresses" or "MAC IDs." I ended up discovering by accident that forcing the WEP off by using 'iwconfig eth1 enc off' would cause eth1 to associate to the nearest AP automatically -- AND, once I did that, I received an IP address, gateway information, and nameserver data in /etc/resolv.conf. Part of the problem was this: Omnicomm:/home/David # iwconfig --help Usage: iwconfig interface [essid {NN|on|off}] [nwid {NN|on|off}] [mode {managed|ad-hoc|...} [freq N.NNNN[k|M|G]] [channel N] [sens N] [nick N] [rate {N|auto|fixed}] [rts {N|auto|fixed|off}] [frag {N|auto|fixed|off}] [enc {NNNN-NNNN|off}] [power {period N|timeout N}] [txpower N {mW|dBm}] [commit] I kept trying to use 'essid' to make my card associate. But I actually *needed* the 'ap' command, which for some reason doesn't show up under --help. <shrug>. But the biggest problem was that the YAST setup doesn't switch away from WEP when faced with an open, unencrypted access point. Unfortunately, I still can't *do* anything with this connection! Everything under iwconfig, ifconfig, and ifstatus looks perfect: ifconfig eth1 eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0F:F8:4F:6A:23 inet addr:10.221.165.247 Bcast:10.221.165.255 Mask:255.255.255.224 inet6 addr: fe80::20f:f8ff:fe4f:6a23/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:25 errors:180 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:180 TX packets:380 errors:22 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:22 collisions:24 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:2002 (1.9 Kb) TX bytes:40874 (39.9 Kb) Interrupt:3 Base address:0x100 Omnicomm:/home/David # iwconfig eth1 eth1 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"tmobile" Nickname:"Omnicomm" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.442GHz Access Point: 00:0E:83:B6:72:4E Bit Rate:11Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm Sensitivity=0/65535 Retry limit:16 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:off Power Management:off Link Quality:13/10 Signal level:-57 dBm Noise level:-98 dBm Rx invalid nwid:2 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:4 Invalid misc:3125 Missed beacon:0 Omnicomm:/home/David # ifstatus eth1 eth1 device: "Cisco Systems", "350 Series Wireless LAN Adapter" eth1 configuration: wlan-bus-pcmcia dhcpcd running eth1 is up 4: eth1: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,NOTRAILERS,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 1000 link/ether 00:0f:f8:4f:6a:23 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff inet 10.221.165.247/27 brd 10.221.165.255 scope global eth1 inet6 fe80::20f:f8ff:fe4f:6a23/64 scope link valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever eth1 IP address: 10.221.165.247/27 (DHCP) current lease for eth1: IPADDR=10.221.165.247 NETMASK=255.255.255.224 GATEWAY=10.221.165.225 DOMAIN='cust.hotspot.t-mobile.com' DNS=66.94.9.120,66.94.25.120 DHCPSIADDR=0.0.0.0 DHCPCHADDR=00:0F:F8:4F:6A:23 eth1 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"tmobile" Nickname:"Omnicomm" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.442GHz Access Point: 00:0E:83:B6:72:4E Bit Rate:11Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm Sensitivity=0/65535 Retry limit:16 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:off Power Management:off Link Quality:14/10 Signal level:-60 dBm Noise level:-98 dBm Rx invalid nwid:2 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:4 Invalid misc:3205 Missed beacon:0 And the bottom of my /etc/resolv.conf: search cust.hotspot.t-mobile.com nameserver 66.94.9.120 nameserver 66.94.25.120 Route -n: Omnicomm:/home/David # route -n Kernel IP routing table Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface 10.221.165.224 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.224 U 0 0 0 eth1 169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 eth1 127.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo 0.0.0.0 10.221.165.225 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth1 I can ping the nameserver IPs, I can ping the gateway (I get no reply, but I assume they have ICMP response shut off), where before I would always get "destination network unreachable." But any attempt to ping or traceroute via *name* produces: Omnicomm:/home/David # ping cust.hotspot.t-mobile.com ping: unknown host cust.hotspot.t-mobile.com Omnicomm:/home/David # traceroute cnn.com cnn.com: Temporary failure in name resolution I've also noticed a tendency for the card to mysteriously go back to using WEP again at 5-10min intervals, at which point it de-associates from the access point. I don't understand why, since I'm not doing anything that would reset the card.