* * * * *

   Fear me! For my acane knowledge is beyond your puny non-computer mind to
                                 comprehend!

I'm convinced that without outside pressure (like Steve Jobs screaming at
you) most programmers tend towards making software esoteric and extremely
hard to use. I think part of this is a perverse satisfaction in learning the
arcane and having it remain arcane as a way of showing off their obvious
intelligence.

Oh, and that false god of “job security” …

To get the wireless network card I have working under Linux, I had to
download the linux-wlan package [1] and install it. It was your standard
Configure; make; make install installation (with the minor annoyance of
having of configuring the Linux source code). And it worked pretty much out
of the compiler, and having better things to worry about than the minituræ of
linus-wlan configuration details, I left it at that.

Until I found myself at Mark's [2] house tonight, trying to get access to his
WAP (Wireless Access Protocol).

His setup requires WEP (Wireless Encryption Protocol). What should be a
simple operation of configuring the WEP key (a very long binary number)
instead turned into half an hour or so of poor documentation and trying to
suss out what it exactly wants for dot11WEPDefaultKeyID and if I need to set
dot11AuthenticatoinAlgorithmsEnable1 to true or not. In fact, it took me
several attempts to realize that wlancfg wants the data typed in (via stdin)
than as command line options (which is how I would expect it to be).

Sigh.

As I was telling Mark, I never bothered to really look into how the software
worked since it worked enough for my needs and I have better things to do
than tweak obscure settings just to prove my programming machismo. I just
want it to work.

I did eventually get on his network, but I'm afraid I'll have to reconfigure
everything to get back on my network.

Update several hours later on Friday Morning

Yes, I had to reconfigure the settings to get back onto my own network. And
afterwards, I wrote this script that should work to get me back onto Mark's
network without me having to reconfigure everything:

> #!/bin/sh
>
> wlancfg set wlan0 <<EOF
> dot11DesiredSSID="NOLAB"
> dot11AuthenticationAlgorithmsEnable1="true"
> dot11AuthenticationAlgorithm1="sharedkey"
> dot11WEPDefaultKeyID="1"
> dot11WEPDefaultKey1="l33tm@d5k1ll5"
> EOF
>
> dhclient wlan0
>

But I won't know until the next time I'm over at Mark's ...


[1] http://www.linux-wlan.com/
[2] http://www.conman.org/people/myg/

Email author at [email protected]