[TriLUG] Help! Wireless problems

[Matt Matthews]

Thanks for all the helpful replies. Here's an update, along with a new
and better (albeit unrelated) question. :^)

> 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 tried this. I upgraded, however, to 2.4.20-19.9 (as opposed to 18.9).
This particular kernel makes several key applications lock up or fail to
start. Important apps would be Evolution and Mozilla, although Pan works
just great. Any idea what's going on there? The upgrade was done through
up2date via Red Hat's demo subscription service, no hand tweaking or
anything. Switching back to the old kernel allows me to, for example,
fire up Evolution and write this email.

> 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.

Setting the ESSID and channel (to avoid being on the same frequency as
my neighbor) seems to be the suggested path. Unfortunately, my wireless
adaptor still NEVER sees my system, only the Linksys one. Using WEP
(assuming I'm doing it correctly) doesn't seem to help matters.

And, here's the real kicker. Turns out that there may be THREE access
points near me. I spoke with the neighbor and he is setting his channel
to 11 and I'm setting mine to 1. However, he had trouble and got
frustrated and just turned all his hardware off (power off, that is).
So, I figured this was a chance to see if I could talk to my WAP without
his in the air as well. Except that I connected to a different Linksys
WAP! I'm so frustrated, that I've given up for the night, but I'm
beginning to fear that my wireless has given up the ghost (over 1.5y
old, and it's one of the "flaky" Barricades, although this is the first
trouble I've had) and I've just been living off of a borrowed connection
without realizing it.

> 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.

Ah. Good to know about hte TriWUG, thanks.

Now, about that kernel problem...

matt