[ILUG] Dell Broadcom wireless card, fon AP and connection problem

[Niall O Broin]

On 21 Apr 2008, at 13:40, Conor Daly wrote:

> I have a Fon wireless AP set up at home.  The lappy has a broadcom  
> cheapo
> wireless card which seems to work nicely with ndiswrapper.  I have  
> been able
> to connect to both networks published by the Fon AP but more  
> consistently to
> the Fon_AP public network and with regular difficulty to the  
> MyPlace private
> network.  I got the Fon AP at the ILUG AGM last year (or was it the
> previous?).
>
> I'm running fedora 8 and NetworkManager.  When I select the MyPlace  
> network,
> the NetworkManager seems to connect but hangs waiting for an IP  
> address.  I
> cannot see any logs on the Fon AP but my /var/log/messages says  
> that the
> connection has been made and it's going to DHCP for an IP address but
> nothing comes back.  It doesn't seem to matter how near or far from  
> the AP I
> am, sometimes I can connect, sometimes not.
>
> At times, deleting my keyring and authenticating afresh with the AP  
> seems to
> work but sometimes not.  When it works, the response to the  
> DHCPDISCOVER is
> almost instant.  When it doesn't, it waits for a 1-minute timeout  
> before
> giving up.  Any thoughts?

I suspect this may be more a FON issue than a Linux issue (but then,  
the FON runs Linux so . . .). I too got a FON at that AGM and it has  
ended up in my brother's house, where he often gets connected to the  
public AP rather than the private one. He was using a Windows PC but  
has now got a Mac, and the problem happened with both (though I THINK  
it has happened more with the Mac). I don't know how the FON APs are  
set up. May they're using two frequencies, and propagation is better  
for the public one (but they'd very close frequencies anyway - I'd  
not have expected that to be an issue).

With the Mac, the solution was to tell it to use the private AP and  
to not be a slut - I don't know if you can do something similar with  
network manager.


Niall