10.07.06

wireless woes

Posted in Random thoughts at 12:31 pm by ducky

I have been spent hours lately fighting with wireless on my IBM Thinkpad T42 on Ubuntu.

Most of the web sites out there that talk about how to deal with wireless issues focus on how to get the right driver for your card. Well, my card works just fine, thank you very much. It works great at home. I just couldn’t get it to work either at my office or at Mom’s.

I was turning all the knobs on the Ubuntu Network Settings wizard, but there turn out to be knobs and dials that the wizard doesn’t set.

When /etc/network/interfaces looked like this:

iface eth1 inet dhcp
wireless-essid momsplace
wireless-channel 6
wireless-key s:password

it didn’t work. However, when I set it to this:

iface eth1 inet dhcp
wireless-essid momsplace
wireless-channel 6
wireless-key s:password  [1] restricted 

then it did work. Apparently telling it [1] (i.e. to use key number one), and restricted (i.e. to always use encryption) were also necessary. I am mystified as to why those would be required.

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