Wireless woes

[vakkotaur]

At Penguicon I tried to get the laptop to recognize the wireless network without any luck. It wasn't too big a deal as it turned out the wireless networking wasn't free and the wired networking was. But it did mean I didn't get to see how to make wireless networking work someplace other than at home.

A couple days ago jmaynard set up the Apple AirPort Express he bought and put in place of a D-Link wireless router. After that, I had to check to see that the laptop would work with it okkay. That was a simple tweak with iwconfig which worked right off. This actually surprised me, because using iwconfig at the Penguicon hotel seemed not to work at all. The settings seemingly refused to change. I even copied the config file I use at home and hand-edited it to try get things to work. I'm still not sure what went wrong.

I know I need to run a script to make the system restart networking with new settings, and I did that. It tried, but then gave up. What should have happened as that iwconfig would make the changes I told it (a new essid, and I think something else), I'd run the (re)start script, the connection would establish, and I could open a browser and get a redirect to tell me how to use (and in that case how to pay for) the connection.

Before leaving Fairmont, I made a point of copying the Slackware help web page that talked about getting wireless networking going. It helped some, but not enough to be successful. Did I RTFM? Yes. TFM didn't get the job done.

I'm not sure what I did wrong, or if I did anything wrong. This bothers me as I plan to take the laptop with me to RCFM and I'd like to have it connected there. The RCFM hotel has free wireless,and does not have wired accessI'm wondering if there was one setting I missed or just what happened. Obviously wireless networking can work, or I'd have no connection at home. And it can work 'on the road' or there'd be plenty of complaints on the web about the problem. And instructions on work-arounds, most likely. What I need is a real beginner's guide that goes through things step by tedious step (not "configure the work, connect" but all the fiddly steps beneath) so I can see what it is that I'm missing. I suspect I was just one "obvious" setting away from things working.

Comments

[aedifica]

I discovered that at UM there are some wifi points that can only be accessed if you register your network card with the U. Maybe the place you were had a similar setup?

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Not as far as I could tell. I'm pretty sure it was a problem with what I was (or was not) doing.

[aatheus.livejournal.com]

I know with Debian, at least, the ESSID, WEP key etc are stored in /etc/network/interfaces. There is probably a file like that for Slackware that all the info is being drawn from.