[clue-tech] Coffee shop wireless connection problem

[Matt Gushee]

Dennis J Perkins wrote:

>> Anyway. What I am most interested in at this point is troubleshooting 
>> techniques. Given that my machine can see the access point, but I am 
>> either failing authentication or failing to get a DHCP lease, what if 
>> anything can I do to get more details about what exactly is happening?

> You could try iwconfig ra0  or iwlist ra0 scan  to see if an ESSID is 
> reported.

'kay, let's see if I understand this. ESSID is, informally speaking, the 
name of the network, isn't it? If so, yes, it usually shows up in the 
list displayed by the wicd GUI, and I also see it when I run

   iwlist scanning

which is basically the same as your command, isn't it? Also, I don't 
have ra* interfaces, I have wlan*. But that's just a different naming 
convention, right?

A couple of things that I maybe should have pointed out earlier:

  * Sometimes when I can't connect, nobody else can. But I am aware of
    several occasions when I couldn't connect, but Windows and Mac users
    in the place could. Most of the time the coffee shop staff *think*
    their network is running fine, which may or may not be true.

  * According to the status messages from the wicd GUI, authentication
    seems to take a really long time (30 seconds?). In most cases, though
    there is no message saying that authentication succeeded, it goes on
    to say that it is obtaining an IP address--but that always fails. I
    think the message is "Failed to obtain IP address."

You know, it occurs to me that part of the difficult I have with WiFi 
comes from not knowing the jargon, because I have RTFM'ed on this issue, 
but I don't understand, for example, most of the iwconfig man page. Can 
you recommend a good glossary of wireless networking terminology?

-- 
Matt Gushee