Wireless works at home but not in motel

pwabrahams · 01-27-2008, 05:20 PM

I have an Acer laptop running Kubuntu Feisty Fawn. At home I have it set up perfectly for internet access to my router, using wpa-psk and the ath0 interface. But now I'm staying at a motel with internet access and the laptop can't find an access point. Yet if I dual-boot to Windows, it works. I'd like to set it up for motel access without clobbering my home access.

dmesg shows the installed wireless inteface as wifi0. Key lines of dmesg are:

Code:

wifi0: Atheros 5212: mem=0xd02000000, irq=17
ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): ath0: link is not ready

I transcribed these manually since I'm composing this post on my girlfriend's laptop running Windows (at the same motel). Since my own laptop can't yet access the Net under Linux, whatever I do can't involve any downloads.

Here is /etc/network/interfaces:

Code:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
address 127.0.0.1
netmask 255.0.0.0

auto eth0
auto eth1
auto eth2
auto ath0
iface ath0 inet dhcp
pre-up wpa_supplicant -Bw Dwext -iath0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
post-down killall -q wpa_supplicant

auto wifi0

And here are key lines from the output of ifup wfi0:

Code:

wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
No DHCP offers received
Ignoring unknown interface wifi0=wifi0

The motel's router is unsecured, but of course I have no physical access to it.

Hangdog42 · 01-28-2008, 03:12 PM

If you're running wpa_supplicant, do you have an entry to allow any SSID? Something like:

Code:

network={
  key_mgmt=NONE
  priority=0	
}

Personally, I've had the best luck in hotels just messing with the console however. Also, you frequently have to go through a browser page before you're fully able to access the web, and I've been in situations where no Linux browser will follow the redirect.

code933k · 01-28-2008, 03:32 PM

I think you lack a proper initialization header in wpa_supplicant.conf like this:

Code:

eapol_version=1
ap_scan=1
fast_reauth=1

And / or

Code:

scan_ssid=1

inside you ANY-SSID setup.

I hope this helps you. Regards

pwabrahams · 01-28-2008, 09:59 PM

I don't think wpa_supplicant is relevant here. I need it at home (where it works as it should) but not in the motel since the motel has open access. I don't even have to go through the browser to get access here (under Windows). The only way wpa_supplicant might be relevant is that I might need to turn it off, but I tried that and it made no difference.

One other thing I observed that might be relevant. Under Windows, if I don't use the connection for a while, it's dropped. The lag time is long enough so that that's not a major problem, but perhaps it's symptomatic of some other peculiarity of the motel's system. Of course, the motel people are not the ones to ask about it.

Apparently the need to get Linux connections working at an arbitrary motel, where no one at the motel knows anything about it, is pretty common. I suppose that's a good thing!

Hangdog42 · 01-29-2008, 07:54 AM

OK, pop open a console and try configuring by hand. Run iwlist ath0 scan to find all of the SSIDs and then use iwconfig to set the SSID. You then should use your dhcp client to request an IP address.

Hopefully either you connect or something goes wrong with a usable error.

pwabrahams · 01-31-2008, 09:57 PM

I've finally gotten the motel connection to work. I did ifdown ath0 to get rid of the nonexistent connection to my home router and then used the Wireless Assistant to get the connection to the router here. Apparently the Wireless Assistant doesn't look at what's in /etc/network/interfaces. The connection is again on ath0 as revealed by iwconfig. I still don't know how to get it to work from the command line, though.

To add to my confusion, apparently the motel's router is overloaded so I sometimes don't get a connection not because of my errors but because the router isn't responding. I guess that applies to dhcp requests as well as other communications.

I still would like a way to set things up so that whenever an open router is detected I have the choice of connecting to it without killing the settings for my home router.

By the way, what is the name of the dhcp client executable?

Hangdog42 · 02-01-2008, 07:23 AM

Quote:

I still don't know how to get it to work from the command line, though.

For a motel, it is usually pretty simple if you know the SSID

iwconfig ath0 essid MotelSSID

Quote:

By the way, what is the name of the dhcp client executable?

There are actually several DHCP clients, and to be honest, I'm not sure what Suse uses. Common ones are:

dhcpcd (note that the c between the p and d is NOT a typo)
dhclient (usually more trouble than it is worth)
ifup (a frequent choice of distros)

Quote:

To add to my confusion, apparently the motel's router is overloaded so I sometimes don't get a connection not because of my errors but because the router isn't responding. I guess that applies to dhcp requests as well as other communications.

Yeah, there isn't much you can do about that except complain, and that is probably useless.