SOLVED: OT: Tips for good wireless signal?

From: Tim Kynerd (tim_at_tram.nu)
Date: 06/06/05 

Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 12:21:27 +0200

On Mon, 06 Jun 2005 04:04:13 +0200, Tim Kynerd wrote:

> On Sun, 05 Jun 2005 23:16:50 +0200, Tim Kynerd wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 04 Jun 2005 20:20:31 -0700, Karen wrote:
>>
>> -snip-
>>
>> Hi Karen and everyone,
>>
>> Thanks for the tips. I've deleted them because I got fed up :-) and
>> decided to go to a different solution, but I've introduced new problems
>> in the process.
>>
>> I bought a Netgear wireless PCI adapter for the Linux machine. That
>> actually worked fine in a sense: the Netgear card was recognized and
>> configured by SuSE 9.3 with very little trouble; the only thing I had to
>> do was to reconfigure the Airport Express to accept connections from it.
>>
>> The problem, though, is that the Airport Express, like the PowerBook,
>> lives in my living room. The Linux machine is in my bedroom, separated
>> by a certain amount of distance as well as a plaster wall. This
>> apparently causes the Netgear adapter to get a weak signal, and
>> therefore to repeatedly drop the wireless connection and re-establish
>> it.
>
> Correction: I don't think this problem is due to signal issues. I've
> reconfigured a few things, and KInternet on the Linux machine now shows
> that while the signal is weakish, it is dropped every ten seconds (like
> clockwork) regardless of the signal strength (confirmed by watching the
> logs in the Airport Management Utility on the PowerBook).
>
> Consequently, I suspect that the card is misconfigured in Linux somehow.
> Does this problem (regular dropping of the connection) sound familiar to
> anyone?
>
> Another possible clue: The Linux interface never seems to get a valid DNS
> server. Could this be what's causing it to repeatedly drop the connection,
> and if so, is there something I can reconfigure to see that it gets a
> valid name server? (The Airport Express base station is configured to
> share the DSL connection using DHCP; the wireless interface in Linux is
> configured to get its own IP address and the name server addresses using
> DHCP.)
>
> Best,
> Tim

Got it.

I was poking around in the Airport Help in Mac OS X and found a section
called "Connecting to the base station using third-party wireless
software." That section stated that in order to let non-Airport software
connect to an Airport base station, you have to use the "equivalent
network password," which you can get from the base station's configuration
in the Airport Admin Utility.

Once I got that password and configured the Netgear card on the Linux
machine to use it, the connection worked fine.

Best,
Tim

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