I have an aluminum Powerbook G4 running Panther with an Airport.
At home and at work, I run wireless networks. Autodection on the hubs works fine.
But when I hit the road, I have problems. Twice this week I've been
unable to connect to wireless hubs while people all around me are
happily logged on with their Powerbooks. The problem happened at the
JetBlue hotspot, and at Pacific Bell Park. Both sites use a system
where, on first launch, you're supposed to be taken to a welcome or
signon page and then you're in business. In my case, I was never
taken to such a signon page, using either Safari or Firefox or IE for
Mac. I restarted, manually typed in the jumpoff URL etc, to no avail.
Our sysadmin thinks that, when you're first taken to the jumpoff
page, the ethernet address of your Wifi card is passed onto the hub
and added to a white list. Of course that doesn't solve my problem.
I'm updating to the latest Airport software right now, but I don't
think that's my problem. Any suggestions?
Bart |
Request for Question Clarification by
aht-ga
on
01 May 2004 11:12 PDT
Public WiFi hotspots are all configured to provide DHCP-assigned IP
addresses to wirelessly-equipped devices within their coverage area.
Before your computer's browser can access anything through the
wireless connection, you will first need to confirm that a) a wireless
connection has been established to the access point (akin to "plugging
in a cable" in a wired world), and b) an IP address has been assigned
to your Powerbook's wireless adapter by the access point.
Reasons for why either or both of these conditions may not be met,
abound. For a), it can be anything from unmatched security settings
(example, you may be defaulting to WEP, while public hotspots do not
use WEP), or perhaps you need to configure your adapter settings to
search for any available access point rather than just the two you
have pre-configured for home and office. For b), are you using a
static IP address at home/work, and therefore have your configuration
set to not request a DHCP-assigned IP address?
The challenge in solving this problem, of course, is that you will
need to go to a public hotspot to test out the various possibilities.
First, check into your default configuration settings, and let me know
what you find.
Regards,
aht-ga
Google Answers Researcher
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