Thread: How Should WiFi Work on Random Hotspots?
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janozaurus is offline janozaurus
2008-01-04 , 01:12
Posts: 57 | Thanked: 10 times | Joined on Dec 2007
#5
Originally Posted by bilofsky View Post
Just wandering around, I see lots of unencrypted routers, but am almost never able to connect to them. It gives either "Network connection error" or "Unable to obtain IP address". On some of these the signal strength is half a bar or better.

Is that normal, not to be able to connect to random unencrypted routers?

Is there anything I can learn from either of those error messages other than that the connection didn't work?
Yes, it's perfectly normal that trial and error includes error. Don't worry, your world is still sane.

Unfortunately, the tablets are too user-friendly to provide much information. With special software you could learn some more but I don't know if anything useful was ported to maemo.

I can explain the "Unable to obtain IP address" error. It means: "The first step, connecting to the AP was probably successful, but the second step, obtaining an IP address from the DHCP server failed." or paraphrased "I think I'm online and a I started to talk but no one answered".

There are many ways to configure a wireless network and most of them require the AP and the client to be configured manually: Authentication, Encryption, IP addresses, routing. There is only one configuration which will work automagically (no security, IP addresses retrieved from DHCP). Bad practise defaults to this configuration.