Re: [tlug] WiFi roaming and open networks

["SL Baur" <steve@example.com>]

On 5/2/08, Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com> wrote:
> 2008/5/3 David J Iannucci <jlinux@example.com>:
>
>
>  >> But, when I connect to a non-password protected WiFi network, I can't
>  >> get access to the internet. Even if the network status icon indicates
>  >> a strong signal, FireFox takes forever to search for the page, and
>  >> then comes back with a "problem connecting to server" error.
>  >
>
> > Occasionally, I'll load a page in Konq and then right away try the same
>  > page in FF, and FF will load it.  But without that "priming", FF sees
>  > nothing. I've planned to post to Ubuntu or Mozilla forums to try to
>  > figure out the problem, but haven't gotten around to it.
>
>
> Sounds like a name resolution problem to me. Try restarting nscd after
>  you connect to the wireless network.

Maybe, but there could well be browser issues involved as well.  I'm
regularly switching a notebook computer between a home wifi-lan and
corporate wired ethernet, suspend to ram/wakeup in the middle and that
doesn't present too much of a problem (sans the stability pains of
Fedora 9 at the
moment).

What I _have_ noticed is that Opera sometimes gets confused when the
home wifi-lan goes fascist every 24 hours (I have to go through a login
sequence in a browser and it temporarily hijacks the entire ipv4 space
until the login is completed).  The hijacked link in the browser history
remains forever broken (though nothing else does).

Do try Josh's suggestion, also try another browser like Opera and see if
it behaves the same way.  If it doesn't, it might be something in FireFox.
Even better might be to try Lynx to take all of the GUI out of the picture.

You might also pay some attention to other software in the middle.
NetworkManager is not nearly as stable as something like the Mac OS X
airport, but it's getting close.  Unfortunately, a case where I can make it
coredump at will 100% of the time is the sequence I have to go through to
connect to the corporate wifi :-(.

-sb