Recap: Laptop running 9.1Pro with a Cisco Aironet 350 card. Worked fine for home WLAN, but would not work with public hotspots (particularly, tmobile). Well, this has been quite a learning experience. Unfortunately, I don't think I'm quite done climbing the learning curve. But this is what I've found so far: 1: YAST network setup for wireless seems to have a bug, or perhaps a feature I don't quite grasp properly. I had the WEP key for my home WLAN set as one of the four available keys under YAST, and had no trouble at home. But when I tried to associate with the TMobile hotspot, I had to use 'iwconfig eth1 enc off' from the shell to associate to the unencrypted hotspot. This worked, but only for a little while -- after maybe 5min or so, if I used iwconfig to check on eth1's status, it would be back to using my home WLAN encryption key again. I had to keep fighting YAST from the command line. (Note: ESSID set under YAST was 'any') 2: 'iwconfig eth1 ap xxxx' was the command I wanted, for use in situations where multiple APs were in range. But for some reason the 'ap' option doesn't show up when I do an 'iwconfig --help'. All the other options do show up. 'essid' doesn't seem to work as a replacement. In fact, 'essid' can be downright counterproductive -- I tried using that first, and it made my 'iwconfig eth1' output *look* as if I was associated, when in fact I was not (But I was still learning iwconfig at that point -- it looks like the key is to double-check the AP MAC ID shown by iwconfig. If it's all FF:FF..., you're not associated). 3: working from the command line, once I realized what had been going wrong encryption-wise, I could dependably get my Aironet card to associate and draw an IP address from the hotspot AP/router. I could even, sometimes, get nameserver data to show up in /etc/resolv.conf, though this wasn't entirely consistent for reasons I haven't puzzled out. But-- 4: I still can't get any traffic to pass through. Ping and traceroute attempts against the DNS IPs shown in /etc/resolv.conf work sometimes, but other times give "destination unreachable" errors. Pinging or traceing anything by name rather than IP causes the command to hang for some time (~2-3min) before returning a "temporary failure of name resolution" or "unkown host" response. At this point, I believe I've got the purely wireless side of the problem licked, albeit in an inelegant fashion. So I suspect that I've moved into more mainstream network troubleshooting areas. Problem is, my grasp of the nuts&bolts of network operations, beyond using ping to check connections, is pretty weak (I can use route -n, for example, but I don't really understand what it's telling me). So if anybody knows a decent 'network primers for n00bs,' let me know, please? :) Something that really explains routing, DNS clients, and the other stuff I'm having trouble with would be nice. I *am* curious, though, as to why the YAST setup would keep overriding the iwconfig commands, even when I wasn't issuing any commands like 'rcnetwork restart,' 'ifup/down,' etc -- just trying 'ping' and 'traceroute.' Is there a background process that keeps resetting the interface to the YAST settings? And with only one key set up out of four, why would the system keep defaulting to that key, even when the YAST ESSID was set to 'any' and the only AP within range was unencrypted? As soon as I forced encryption off using iwconfig, the card associated instantly, without needing any more help (assuming I was in a one-AP environment), so I can't see it being an ESSID problem. Also, the KDE Control Center's Wireless Networks setup doesn't seem to work for me. I tried blanking out the YAST settings and using the KDE setup on my home WLAN, but no dice. I recall seeing some complaints here not too long ago that this program was problematical, so maybe it's not just me.