Netbook, back again

[Chris Bartram]

No, use the VM superhub in modem mode, rather than as a router.

[John Rumm]

If you can get the netbook running on the ethernet as a temporary measure, then drop me an email (or give me a bell on the office number - see web site), and I can arrange to have a look at it for you via remote control.

[Jack98]

But might have got its config changed so its now attempting to use WEP when previously it wasn?t doing that.

[mm0fmf]

I think you are trolling them really well. Just answering enough of the questions to keep them coming back for more. Carefully ignoring to answer certain parts of the questions etc. That requires skill.

I'll give you 8/10 for keeping them replying, not to one thread, but two.

[The Natural Philosopher]

And with XP it looks like thats an option you can set on the wifi connection

[ss]

Ok will try and ring tomorrow, it did run on the ethernet yesterday.

[ss]

You are entiltled to your opinion but a lack of knowledge on a particular subject does not equate to trolling.

[The Natural Philosopher]

No. Its borderline but sadly pretending to be clueless is a classic technique.

Have you gone into control panel and tried to set up a new wifi connection using the wizard, selecting WPA, and entering the info on the back of the router for SSIFD and password, yet?

[ss]

I deleted all the wireless connections and started a new one. I think I was doing ok until this cropped up:

...""It is asking for a network password needs to be 40bits or 104bits depending on your network configuration. This can be entered as a 5 or

13 ascii characters or 10 or 26 hexadecimal characters"......

[The Natural Philosopher]

Then you did NOT tick the box at the bottom of the first screen that says 'WPA'

Go back start again and look on every screen for 'WPA'

[ss]

I changed from WPA2 to WPA and comes back with unable to find certificate and when I go back to properties it has reverted back to WPA2

[The Natural Philosopher]

If it was asking you for "40bits or 104bits depending on your network configuration. " then you had WEP configured, not WPA nor WPA2.

If te XP end is right summat is up with the router

[ss]

Update:

I think I can close this off now. The netbook has been investigated in depth by remote by J Rumm for over an hour, the situation is still not resolved and looks like winxp is likely the issue. I am confident that all the contributions by others were covered by John, I say confident in as much I haven?t a clue to most of what he was looking at.

Anyhow I do thank you all for your contributions and a special thanks to John for the time taken to investigate it for me.

[John Rumm]

For those still following along, I will give a quick summary of what we know now...

So this is not a WEP/WPA issue. WinXP was correctly identifying WPA, and actually connected without any difficulty.

What it does have is a DHCP problem after having authenticated on the wifi. If I manually assign an IP in the correct subnet, then it works ok. However that is not a useable solution for the use case required.

The router configuration and DHCP setup is fine (and other wifi devices have connected and DHCPed ok)

This could be related to the issues addressed in KB953761 (DHCP options not recognised, when sever includes option 43). However that hotfix does not seem to have done it initially at least, although I am currently clarifying an issue on that.

[The Natural Philosopher]

so why was it issuing a wep error message?

router has some special magic for its mac addr?

[T i m]

<snip>

And some were so convinced it was. ;-)

And we know DHCP works over Ethernet.

Inc DNS etc?

Mobile netbook ... I'd still be interested to see if it connects wirelessly to *another* network.

I'd be interested to see if that netbook could connect to that router with Linux. ;-)

And it did connect to that router previously, possibly before VM rolled out an update?

Can I think you for doing what this group was known for, helping people in the real use of the word. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

p.s. Just a thought given your findings, was there a 3rd party Firewall on there?

[Andy Burns]

well, without "being there" the error messages did hint at WEP

I think we did conclude that it had associated to the wifi last time around

that too, hence trying to get the O/P to test static addr last time when it was getting APIPA

Doesn't really get anywhere if the O/P wants XP ...

[T i m]

<snip>

Not really the goal though Andy [1]. It would be to test to see if the hardware will *still* connect to the VM Hub *now*, indicating that it is possible and so there may be some mileage in checking say WiFi drivers (assuming John didn't etc) or testing to see if 'something else' (like a software firewall or OS glitch) might be holding it back?

If it didn't connect with Linux (assuming Linux saw the card correctly) then the chances are it's something that can't be easily fixed, outside an alternative WiFi card etc (that I would have tried by now).

Cheers, T i m

[1] But if the OP was able to connect and was only using the netbook for web browsing and he saw he could still do that easily on Linux, he might use it. ;-)

[Andy Burns]

It was confirmed by John's tests that it does connect to the wifi, and works if DHCP is disabled, therefore it's not a driver issue.

[Andy Burns]

^^^^^^^^^^^ or hardware