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Wireless Networking

Journal jawtheshark's Journal: Ad-Hoc sucks!!! (and a "Thank you") 7

Journal by jawtheshark
First: thank you to all people replying to my "Music and Rythm" journal. I've read all messages, but didn't have time to reply to each single one of you. Let's just say that tuesday night we went to the regular dancing course. We get a discount because we did the wedding-crash-course. The pace in the regular course is much much much slower and I got more time to adapt. I still am bad with rythm, but the paces already go better. You won't make a dancing pro out of me. Still, many comments made me think and (maybe) adapt my own behaviour.
So: thank you for all the help. You won't see me on TV as a professional dancer anytime soon, but at least I had fun tuesday night.

However, let's get back to what this site is dedicated to: "Nerds". So this Nerd bought a wireless network card as you know. This nerd tried it out at school, and yes, it works. The software provided by sitecom, is really "guess and try" and the documentation only brings you how to install the software. I still don't get how to set up an Ad-Hoc network using that card, but that doesn't really matter now.

After all, I've got better machines that my school laptop. Remember my good old dear darling iBook G3 (600Mhz, Dual USB)? Well, she's now fully loaded. There is no possible way to expand her. Her RAM has been at a glorious 640Meg since january and today she got the final thing that makes her complete: a Apple Airport card. No, not the Extreme kind, the good old 802.11b. I originally planned to buy one on ebay.de. The cards there go away for about 70 to 110 Euro. Used of course. I went to our local one stop Apple Shop and they had still a few in stock. Wasn't the cheapest (119€) but at least I've got warranty on it and it doesn't come from some guy I don't know.

Anyways: all this to say... I should be able to setup a Ad-Hoc Wireless network. As said: the sitecom card isn't clear on how to do it, but OS X wouldn't be OS X if it wasn't easy there. So, I created a new Ad-Hoc Network, enable WEP 128-bit, configure the IP to 192.168.1.10 (subnet: 255.255.255.0) and do the same on the sitecom card, but IP 192.168.1.11. All should be functional now, one would think.

Well, no: I can't ping hammerhead from silky, and inversely I can't ping silky from hammerhead. They don't seem to see each other but the network is detected. (silky is the iBook, hammerhead the P-III 600Mhz 512Meg RAM Fujitsu Siemens I got from my old work for 100€ -- it has less RAM when I bought it). I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing wrong. All looks just fine to me.

Finally: I hope that access points have better ranges than the wireless network cards. When I put silky in the bedroom and hammerhead in the living room, the signal drops to 0. That's not even 10 meters (30 feet). The signal has to go through two concrete walls though.

Oh, and since my computer naming scheme came up again: I named the printer "wobbegong" some time ago. :-) So these days, I print on "wobbegong".

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Ad-Hoc sucks!!! (and a "Thank you") More

Ad-Hoc sucks!!! (and a "Thank you")

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  • have you set the default gateway on 192.168.1.11 to 192.168.1.10, does 192.168.1.10 have some sort of internet connection sharing?

    in linux:

    sbin/iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
    echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
    - dunno about macosux
    • No, I didn't set default gateways. You don't need a default gateway if you stay on the same subnet (which both machines do). Internet connection sharing is not enabled. Let's just say that this is equivalent on having to computers hooked up to a cross-cable and you can't ping the machines for some odd reason.

      What you desribe in your command is enabling IP forwarding. I don't know how to do that on OS X with the command line, but enabling Internet sharing is easy. You can bet your ass that I know to do

  • Most of the time that I've had a wireless problem where I can "see" the network, but can't ping or anything, it's been a WEP issue. I'm using 128-bit WEP at work and one mistyped or transposed character and it will connect, but not associate.
    • I tried that too. It didn't work. It's virtually impossible that I mistyped the key, because I took the "ASCII option". This means, I invented a 13 character password which mede sense to me (for example: "JawsWantsWiFi", but that isn't the password I really used). I could of course try something like CAFEBABECAFEBABECAFEBABECA (128-bit Hex). I didn't try that.

      It didn't work without WEP. Very strange. Perhaps I set something wrong up? I could try 40-bit for a change too, didn't try that either. (M

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