Recently in Wireless Category

I upgraded my wrt54g to the latest dd-wrt firmware over the weekend from v23 to v24sp1. The annoying thing is that they highly recommend the unit is set to factory defaults which means re-entering the config in by hand after the upgrade. This is not a quick and easy task, especially whn you have to get the config off the there doesn’t seem to be a “print config” page. However, by using the screengrab firefox extension it didn’t take long to open up each dialog page, right click and choose screengrab, save, complete page.  Saving all the screenshots into a unique folder means I have a nice copy of the config that I was then able to refer to when rebuilding the unit.

The new firmware also supports wpa2 so I enabled that on the router and then found that my xpsp2 box couldn’t see the router. I was pretty sure I had all the updates for xp on the laptop but I guess not.  A quick download of the hotfix 893357, one reboot later and I was connected with wpa2.  I’m sure we’re going to see more of this sort of thing on client laptops so this will also be a good placeholder for work.

I haven’t got the openvpn configuration sorted out, I think I have to set this up from scratch as I forgot to save one of the keys – but openvpn seems to be more integrated in this version – at least there are dialog boxes for openvpn – there didn’t use to be.

(in my opinion) than the 5.04 release that was out a while back. At least 5.04 would boot on my machine but 5.10 doesn't. It gets as far as detecting hot plug devices and then the machine hangs. Various messages are displayed in the other consoles (ctrl-f2 to f4 i think) but nothing obvious as to what is going on. I thought I would try 5.10 on the desktop as the 5.04 would not let me use ndiswrapper for the Hawking Technology wifi usb card that I have (which incidentally uses the zydas 1211 driver). I think that if I risked putting ubuntu onto the hard disk rather then running from the livecd then I might stand a chance of getting it to work, but ideally I want a combination of livecd & usb wifi adapter which means I can use this at other wifi enabled pc's.

For some weird reason my wifi started to get disconnected whenever the cordless phone was used. Apparently 2.4Ghz phones cause interference with wireless as they operate on the same spectrum. The weird thing is that this was working ok for 3 months without causing obvious dropouts. A bit of searching suggested that changing the channel that the wifi is on should fix or reduce the problem. I changed from channel 11 to 1 (the other end) and the problem didn't go away. I changed it to 6 and still it didn't go away. Interestingly though a wifi card placed about 1' away from the access point with the cordless phone being used downstairs would result in no wifi service. I changed the channel back to 11 last night and for some reason the wifi no longer gets disrupted when the phone is in use.
Seeing as though that is how I started off I am not sure why this problem has occured. Still, at least I can now use the internet when other people are on the phone.

VxUtil is a free (for personal use) suite of network utilities for a pocket pc that will give you dns lookups, ping sweeps etc and the all important ipconfig of your pocketpc. Downloaded it this morning and it works great. If I had had it installed last night I *might* have found it handy!

I switched on the wireless card in the pocketpc last night as I drove into town to get our indian meal. I was surprised to see 4 access points active in the town (at 7.30pm on a Friday night there is unlikely to be a business need for wireless access) active. Surprised because when I last did this about a year ago there were NO access points in Congleton at all.
Needless to say 3 of them were using out of the box settings, but 1 of them did have WEP encryption set. The other 3 had the default ssids of linksys,belkin54g set.

Well I'm still waiting for feedback from Linksys on the original router and have not heard anything back since their "have you tried resetting and logging in?" question. However I've been given a swap from the customer (it is a good job he works for an electronics company) and this one seems to work fairly well. The firmware is at a higher level than the original box but not the most recent level but I'm not going to risk the upgrade of firmware again as this has already cost quite a bit of time to troubleshoot and fix. Performance doesn't seem bad and this unit works much better with the linksys card than the other one did - xp recognised it immediately and connected with no problems and most importantly, no having to run up and down the stairs again.

Decided I'd have a go at setting up the linksys wag54g. At first glance it all seemed to work on on the lan side (I've not yet plugged it into the telephone line) I upgraded the firmware, or tried to. As the upgrade process got to 100% of the bar across the screen, internet explorer then refreshed to a 404. When I closed the browser down and opened it up again it came up with a successful upgrade process. (weird).
Now though, whenever I connect to the lan interface it comes up with "Cannot find server" even though I can ping it.
Grrrrrrr

I've had the misfortune to have to reconfigure an xp machine with a linksys WPC54G pcmcia card and it is awful. Sitting in the lounge it very rarely connects to my netgear wifi hub upstairs. It keeps asking me for the wep key and doesn't connect even though the signal strength is about 60%. However if I leave it long enough or walk up the stairs, the card kicks in and then I can walk back downstairs again and use wifi ok.....until I need to reboot. As I am doing a reinstall, there are lots of reboots - about 4 for windows updates, Norton Internet Security has needed about 4 (and its still not finished) and I'm sure other software has also needed reboots. Hopefully the performance will be better when the linksys card is partnered with the adsl gateway that has been purchased - I'll find out later this week (as I have two installs scheduled this week!)

free wi-fi Ohio hotspots wireless internet access list may be useful in the next week or two ;-)
I didn't know panera bread did free wifi and thats just one of the places i've spent time sipping coffee (although its not my favourite blend of coffee)

I got an email from BT Openzone with their Special offers at BT Openzone, which contained the good news that they are offering 500 minutes of WIFI access from their hotspots for £1 for the first three months. Be warned though that if you don't cancel within the three months you are signed up to a 12 month subscription at £5 a month thereafter for 500 minutes. That is still not a bad price - IF you have a bt openzone hotspot near where you need to access the internet.

Public IP - FREE WiFi Solutions - Open Source Wireless Internet gives you the ability to run your own hotspot and it all runs off a cd without touching the hard disk - not sure how you'd create all the accounts you'd need though.Thanks LibraryPlanet

For once BT have done something right - I'm online using BTOpenzone this evening and because they are doing a promotion this week I get access for free (normally £15 for 24 hours (or 2 hours in a month for £10) which is expensive, and more than the hotel last night was. The weird thing is that I signed up for an account with my chosen username and password and THEN I saw the link to wireless broadband week (but no clue that this would give me free access until I clicked the link out of curiosity)
UpdateThe link for free wifi access for a week

Whats the point in having wireless at the hotel if its unavailable in the bedrooms?

I'm sitting in the hotel lounge at the moment typing this blog entry thanks to ukexplorer's wifi link to the internet. Although it's a tad expensive its fast (much better than dialup) and means i log my geocaches finds, pick my email up and check the news feeds. Kristen if you are reading this - fire up msn please :-)

It wasn't until I got back to the main office and switched on my Axim that I realised it had somehow been running Pocketwarrior this morning and detected 3 wireless lans in the building that I was in - all three without WEP installed, ssid's of 3Com, Default and Actiontec. Looks like someone doesn't know what they are doing!

Apparently BT are teaming up with McDonalds to offer WIFI at the drivethrough. Now I thought you got into enough trouble eating at the wheel, let alone operating a laptop or handheld at the same time....and as for the wardrivers, how interested are they going to be in the number of BigMacs being ordered at that present moment - mind you, hacking the wireless network could produce some fun food orders and who knows, you might even get what you ordered!

I was reading in the local paper that Easton has had a wireless (T1) connection to the internet enabled at the shopping mall. They have also made the generous decision to not charge for access (but at the same time they do not provide support for the facility either) which sounds great. Already there are reports of people going shopping with the bloke sitting in the car with a laptop whilst the wife/girlfriend goes inside the mall. Unfortunately I've not brought my pda with me so i can't check it out myself.

bluejackQ nicely explains what BlueJacking is and how to do it. I'm going to try doing it tonight at the yfriday concert.

Its amazing how many blogs you get a chance to read and comment on when you can't sleep! Rob has written some software that can be uploaded to a Linksys WRT54G wireless access point that forces people to go to a html page of your choosing when they first use your access point. This is similar to the way commercial wifi providers work. You would then normally sign up for a limited period of access, but in this case you would probably acknowledge the accesspoint owners "welcome" and info page before continuing to surf. A neat hack - shame it won't work on my netgear box although I guess it won't be long before something like this will get hacked to work on other machines.

http://nocat.net/download/NoCatSplash/

The power supply arrived this morning about 3 minutes before I was due to go to work so I've not had a chance to use it yet - hopefully it all works tonight!

After ringing Netgear after having no response on the email, and spending 9 minutes on hold I spoke to a techie who said that the problem was likely to do with having a duff power supply. If i installed the usb manager software and got some specific error messages - "Device not recognised" or "DSU not recognised" (or something like that) then the problem was definately a faulty psu. Seeing as though that was the error message I got when I installed the usb software I persuaded him to send me a replacement PSU and I don't need to send anything back so its a free replacement. The PSU comes from the netherlands so I have to wait a couple of days for it :-( Still I'll be glad to be wireless again! The daft thing is that the phone techies don't have access to the emails that are sent to the tech support address!

After taking the wireless Access Point into the office and not getting it picked up on the lan at all with the snmp manager or my network scanner I sent an email off to Netgears Technical Support department yesterday requesting a RMA number. As yet I've not heard anything back (apart from an auto acknowledgement with a ticket number and a list of frequently asked questions, all of which have nothing to do with my problem). I took the unit back home to triple check on the original lan and it still didn't work there either - in fact it doesn't even light up the led on the hub to say there is an active connection (and yes I've tried a different network cable).

For about a week now the wireless lan has crawled to a halt. I uploaded a file to my website and it downloads on the lan in 15 seconds. If I download over the wireless lan it's *expected* to take 9 minutes 24 seconds. This is sitting within 1 metre of the Access Point, with full signal strength and 11Mbps on the speed. Any ideas on what could cause this and how to troubleshoot it? As its basically useless at the moment :-( Pings are 6 ms slower on the wireless lan)

Been having some weird problems with the wireless in the past couple of days - software says I have a good or excellent signal running at 11mb yet performance to web pages is abysmal yet the wired computer is fine so I know its not the ADSL connection. I pinged my two websites from the xp laptop this morning and got an average connection time of 103 and 92ms for helsby.net and absoblogginlutely.net
However when I pinged from the wired connection it was about 10ms greater than the wireless connection! Like I said in the topic - weird!

After checking on the O2 website this afternoon I've found that I can get a free email account on the o2.co.uk domain and then also get emails sent to that address forwarded to my mobile via sms. It looks like it is free too - I've not seen anywhere which says I have to pay for it!
You can filter the emails so you dont get deluged with sms's but the filtering system is rudimentary and badly worded. For example you can filter on sender equals, subject contains and attachment.
To me this implies subject contains the text string and the sender is exactly what you type in, then you will get an sms....not so.
The "sender is" really means Sender contains.....
Also if you put non alpha characters such as ! then the sms seems to get triggered all the time - probably because the ! normally acts as a NOT in logic.

Residents in the tiny Polynesian island of Niue have got free wireless access. It also looks like they are pretty clued up on technology too as they had free email and free broadband access at the local cybercafe ages ago. Good on them! It sounds like an ideal place to go on holiday - nice weather (I presume), beaches and internet access :-)