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: