[PLUG-TALK] Wireless in Munchkinland

Keith Lofstrom keithl at gate.kl-ic.com
Thu Aug 30 14:56:03 UTC 2012


I'm looking for some wireless kludge setup advice.

I spent a couple of hours waiting for my next flight at Kansas
City airport, aka MCI, aka MunChkInland airport because the
divided-down-the-spine terminal is too small for large-sized
adults.  Kansas City is in Missouri, so when Dorothy's house
flew in, "not in Kansas anymore", this is where it landed.
AFAIK, our 737 did not crush any witches, so air traffic
control seems to be functioning somewhat better these days.

I had hoped to use the alleged free wireless, but the setup is
strange - it seems that the gateway is not within the assigned
address range.  Here are some lines from /var/log/messages:

Aug 29 14:28:25 kao NetworkManager: <info>    address 10.203.63.150 
Aug 29 14:28:25 kao NetworkManager: <info>    prefix 22 (255.255.252.0) 
Aug 29 14:28:25 kao NetworkManager: <info>    gateway 74.5.120.9 
Aug 29 14:28:25 kao NetworkManager: <info>    nameserver '204.117.214.10' 
Aug 29 14:28:25 kao NetworkManager: <info>    nameserver '199.2.252.10' 

Note that the gateway (74.5.120.9) is not within the segment
address range assigned by the WAP:  10.203.60:xx to 10.203.63.xx  
and I kept getting "no route to" error messages when I tried to 
connect anywhere.   I even tried (horrors!) turning off iptables
to see if that was blocking something that Linux does when faced
with this misconfiguration.  Perhaps Windoze (and newer Linux
distros) have some hack to bypass this WAP misconfiguration, so
most people get connected.

My ifconfig/route knowledge was not adequate for the task, the 
terse man pages did not contain suggestions for dealing with idiotic
WAP configs, and of course google was not available to educate me.

Where I am now, it works:

Aug 30 07:10:43 kao NetworkManager: <info>    address 192.168.2.2 
Aug 30 07:10:43 kao NetworkManager: <info>    prefix 24 (255.255.255.0) 
Aug 30 07:10:43 kao NetworkManager: <info>    gateway 192.168.2.1 
Aug 30 07:10:43 kao NetworkManager: <info>    nameserver '192.168.2.1' 
Aug 30 07:10:43 kao NetworkManager: <info>    domain name 'chphelps' 

route -n:

Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
192.168.2.0     0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     2      0        0 wlan1
0.0.0.0         192.168.2.1     0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 wlan1

----------------------------------------

So, if I ever find myself in Kansas City again, hubbing and
hobnobbing with the hobbits, I imagine I must type in some
manual connection commands after NetworkManager fails. 

Suggestions?

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs



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