[TriLUG] Help! Wireless problems

[Jeremy Portzer]

On Mon, 2003-07-21 at 22:10, Matt Matthews wrote:
> Apparently my neighbors have a WAP and my laptop is now connecting to it
> instead of the one in my back room. I cannot figure out how to tell my
> laptop to ignore the other access point. When I try iwconfig to set
> things like the access point or frequency/channel, I get messages that
> it can't be done. Example:
> 
> [root at laptop root]# iwconfig eth1 ap XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
> Error for wireless request "Set AP Address" (8B14) :
>     SET failed on device eth1 ; Operation not supported.
> 
> (in the above, the MAC has been obscured)
> 
> The laptop is a Dell Latitude C640 with built-in wireless using the
> orinoco_cs module. Kernel is 2.4.20-13.9 (Red Hat, obviously) and
> wireless-tools is version 25-8.

There's a new kernel that came out last month, 2.4.20-18.9, that
contained a TON -- thounsands of lines -- of fixes to various wireless
drivers and the wireless subsystem.  (Just yesterday, 2.4.20-19.9 came
out to fix some security issues.)  I'd strongly recommend upgrading to
the new kernel and see if that reduces your problems.

I have a Linksys WPC 11 v3 (which uses orinoco_cs), and upgrading to the
new kernel took care of a number of nagging problems, such as "Error
-110 writing Tx descriptor to BAP" that would be generated thousands of
times per second in my syslog.

> I have an SMC Barricade WAP. I can set the channel or the SSID or try
> encryption, but up until now I've not had a problem. (I use MAC
> filtering on my own WAP, so I don't think this guy can get on mine by
> accident.)

Can you set the ESSID?  That's how you normally tell a card which
network to connect to.  Normally you don't set the access point,
frequency, or channel manually, it's handled for you in 'managed mode'
based on whichever networks it finds given the ESSID.

> If anyone can help me fix this I'd be right appreciative. I'd rather not
> have to bother the neighbor if possible. Feel free to email me directly,
> if this is less of a Linux problem and more of a wireless/networking
> problem.

There is also a "Triangle Wireless Users Group" at
http://www.triwug.org/ where this is 100% on topic... but it's certainly
fine here, too.

Hope this helps,

Jeremy


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| Jeremy Portzer       jeremyp at pobox.com       trilug.org/~jeremy     |
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