Arch Linux

Convergence

Member

Registered: 2005-07-02

Posts: 377

Wireless newbie[resolved]

I just followed the "Wireless Setup" and "WPA Supplicant" wikis, and I'm kind of stumped.  I got an IP address from my router (I used DHCP) and ifconfig, and route -n look good.  They both list the correct address for my router as my gateway but, I can't ping my router, or get on the net. 

The signal strength is pretty weak, my computer tells me that I have a 61% signal strength from the router, and the router says that it gets 25% from the computer.  Would that completely prevent me from accessing the net, or pinging my router?

Background:  This card was working fine a week ago, but the computer was running windows.  Then i moved into a (large) appartment that apparently has lots of private wireless networks eating crowding up the 2.4 gig spectrum.  I first tried using the gui tool wlanassistant.  Wlanassistant reported a full 5 star signal from the router, but it always failed to connect, so I decided to try the manual approach.  Now I at least get an IP address, but can't get any traffic flowing.  Also, i switched from cable internet to clearwire (I don't recommend it), so that might be fouling up the signal.

Last edited by Convergence (2009-02-04 12:02:31)

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It's a very deadly weapon to know what you're doing
---  William Murderface

R00KIE

Forum Fellow

From: Between a computer and a chair

Registered: 2008-09-14

Posts: 4,734

Re: Wireless newbie[resolved]

If many APs are configured to use the same channel then it is to be expected that things will not work as well as they should, try to manually configure your router to use an unused channel if you can.
On the configuration side of things you could give wicd a try, I've been using it since I have started using Arch a few months back and it always worked great .
As for the signal strength, it should work at those levels you report.

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R00KIE
Tm90aGluZyB0byBzZWUgaGVyZSwgbW92ZSBhbG9uZy4K

Convergence

Member

Registered: 2005-07-02

Posts: 377

Re: Wireless newbie[resolved]

Thanks for the reply rookie. Why am I always tired when I decide to work on these things?  It turns out that some firewall settings were blocking it. Thanks to "Wonder" in IRC for pointing that out.

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It's a very deadly weapon to know what you're doing
---  William Murderface