Recently in AT&T Wi-Fi at Starbucks Category

I brought my newly built OpenBSD 4.4 laptop to Starbucks in Tarzana/Reseda (actually the corner of Victory Boulevard and Tampa Avenue) to see how the free AT&T-powered WiFi would work in OpenBSD, which I've learned from my last OpenBSD laptop isn't a slam-dunk when it comes to getting logged in to Starbucks' not-open-to-the-world WiFi service.

What usually goes awry is that the laptop — in this case a 2002-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 — picks up an IP address with no problem from the AT&T router. (I'm using my trusty, works-with-everything Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA wireless card.)

But once I start a browser, I don't often get the login screen that actually tells AT&T's lovely router to start passing packets through my IP address.

I actually did have some luck months ago with the Compaq Armada 7770dmt running OpenBSD 4.2 with the Opera and Dillo Web browsers.

But today with the Toshiba running OpenBSD 4.4, I couldn't get anything going with Firefox or Opera. No Web pages would load. I couldn't get a login screen. Never mind that I forget my password every time I try to use this WiFi (that tends to happen when you do something every four months or so).

This laptop does have Windows XP on it, and I was ready to try it when I quit X and ran the Lynx text-only browser from the console.

I got the AT&T Wifi login page, was able to reset my password and log in to the service. Then I launched Firefox, somehow got to an AT&T WiFi page and changed my password.

One thing I'll be trying next time if I don't get a login screen in the browser is to go to this URL, which seems to be the root of all AT&T WiFi-ness in this corner of the country.

It should've come up automatically this way, but hopefully having this URL in my bookmarks will make all this jockeying a thing of the past.

By the way, I didn't have any of these problems using GNU/Linux (Puppy Linux 2.13, to be more specific) to connect to AT&T's Starbucks WiFi.

Bottom line: If Starbucks Wi-Fi isn't coming up in your browser and you're in California, go to https://secure3.sbc.com/ and try your luck there.
Next I'll be trying the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf free WiFi, which unlike that at Starbucks doesn't require any purchases, registering of any cards, and hopefully not the entry of any logins or passwords.

Yep, I'll expect it to just work. Update forthcoming

Remember the last time I tried using the free Wi-Fi at Starbucks?

I couldn't get it to work with OpenBSD on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt with Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA wireless card), but everything worked fine with Puppy.

Yesterday I tried again, but I couldn't remember my AT&T Wi-Fi login or password.

Today I have them, and upon first boot in OpenBSD 4.2, I got an IP, no problem, but DNS wasn't working. I finally got it jump-started by restarting the network:

# sh /etc/netstart

That started DHCP again, and for some reason the nameserver was working.

I started the Opera Web browser, logged in, and now I have free wireless working in OpenBSD 4.2 from everybody's favorite coffee chain.

I need to test this some more to make sure the DNS problem either doesn't persist or is easily corrected. Again, in Linux I've had no problems.

But it's nice to know that AT&T and Starbucks don't have anything against OpenBSD.

Since I shocked it back to life, the $15 Laptop (1999 Compaq 7770dmt with 233 MHz Pentium II MMX CPU, 144 MB RAM and 3 GB hard drive) has relied on an Orinoco WaveLAN Silver 802.11b wireless PCMCIA card for networking.

The WaveLAN is truly a wonder, working in both my 1996 Apple Macintosh Powerbook 1400, plus just about every damn thing made thereafter, and it has served me quite well in the years since I fought and scratched for it on eBay.

But I don't really have a lot of wireless networking in my life. My Netgear router used to pump out 802.11b, but the radio died about a year ago, and the router is now wired-only, where it continues to work wonderfully.

And at the Daily News offices, no WiFi penetrates the hallowed halls of Editorial, where all I have at my disposal is wired Ethernet.

The wide-open WiFi signals I sometimes "borrow" from my neighbors are weak at best and usually don't work. The best WiFi I've tried is at the Los Angeles Public Library's many branches, but I don't have time to linger.

And the now-free WiFi for Starbucks cardholders works great with the Compaq in Linux but not at all on OpenBSD (I know this because OpenBSD wireless on this very laptop does work at the library).

So I've been contemplating purchase of a PCMCIA/Cardbus Ethernet card for some time. They're cheap. But do they work on my ancient hardware and many and varied operating systems?

I picked up a TRENDnet TE100-PCBUSR 10/100Mbps 32-Bit CardBus Fast Ethernet Card last week and finally got a chance to remove the Orinoco WaveLAN card, insert the TRENDNet and give it a try.

It works!

The TRENDnet uses a tried, true and otherwise compatible Realtek chipset with the 8139too Linux driver.

I had no trouble loading the driver and configuring the card in Puppy Linux 2.13 (where I had to select the driver on my own) and Puppy 4.00 (where the system detected the card and correctly chose the driver for me).

So for the first time in the year or so that I've had the Compaq Armada 7770dmt, I have reliable networking for the aging but still sturdy laptop at both home and work.

The next thing I'm going to try is seeing if the laptop can physically accommodate the TRENDnet wired and Orinoco wireless cards at the same time, and if I can in turn configure both to work without having to pull one and plug in the other.

$15 Laptop note: The eight-part series on finding the right OS for the $1Compaq Armada 7770dmt is ready to run. All I need to do is get the entries into Movable Type and queue them up to run. I hope to do that in the next few days.

I hooked up my Starbucks card with AT&T today to draw on the free Wi-Fi now available at the coffee giant, and was pleasantly surprised to have good broadband speed in Puppy Linux 2.13 on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt).

I was even able to sign on using the Dillo browser. I started Seamonkey after that, but just being able to log in with Dillo was a surprise.

Even more of a surprise, however, was that the AT&T Wi-Fi didn't work in OpenBSD 4.2, which I have installed as the primary OS on the laptop.

Now I know that wireless works fine in OpenBSD, because I use it at home and at the Los Angeles Public Library. When OpenBSD booted, I got an IP, and I could ping that IP. I should've written down the location's IP and tried to ping that. Otherwise, I couldn't ping anything, and as a result could not get any services to work. That means I couldn't get data into or out of the laptop.

Why does AT&T Wi-Fi work in Linux but not OpenBSD? That's a good question