Recently in Networking for dummies (like me) Category

I always pull the trigger too soon when declaring success with a new WiFi adapter/software/hardware combination, and I'm hoping that's not the case with the Airlink 101 AWLL3028, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and my aging Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101.

But today I first had trouble connecting with my WEP encryption key (I know I shouldn't be using WEP ... and I will change to WPA2 once I resolve a few issues and get the rest of the house's computers on board ...).

Then when I finally did connect (had to reboot) I had the typical screen-freezes-and-ctrl-alt-backspace-AND-ctrl-alt-delete-have-no-effect-so-I-have-to-do-a-hard-reset.

That's the beauty of blogging where absolutely no one is making any damn money from the entire enterprise: I can just spin out a fake word with 30 or so hyphens and just move on.

OK ... I was reprimanded once for using the kind of language that flows continuously through my favorite podcast, and I considered just chucking the whole blogging-for-the-man thing and doing this on my own time, on my own site and enjoying the tens of dollars yearly I could earn from Google AdSense.

OK, I pretty much do this entirely on my own time as is ...

Anyhow, I'm ready to return to the raw meat of this blog post, which is my trouble with wireless networking.

So I did the hard reset, booted back into Ubuntu and while things seem a bit slow, networking-wise (that could be anything), it's working OK for the moment.

Here's what I'm thinking:

The problem might not be the specific wireless networking adapter; it could be an issue with USB (1.1 in the case of this old hunk of saved-from-the-garbage hardware). Whether Linux-related or not, perhaps the Toshiba just can't handle using the USB inteface that intensely.

I don't recall having any problems with the PCMCIA adapter I use with every damn PCMCIA-equipped computer known to woman and man, namely the Orinoco WaveLAN Silver (all I'm saying is if you don't have one of these, go to eBay and get one; for me's it's the geek-networking equivalent of the Swiss Army knife or Leatherman.

So a "newer" Cardbus adapter (maybe another $10 Airlink?) might work better for this particular laptop.

Another thing: If whatever problem I'm having is related to software, it's possible that performance will improve and crashes will diminish (or end entirely) with newer versions of everything from the Linux kernel (remember, I'm using Ubuntu 8.04, which is pretty much a year and a half old; ancient in Linux terms) to the dreaded NetworkManager in GNOME or anything else in the stack.

But given my recent experience, I'm extremely gunshy and more worried about regressions than either a lack or abundance of "improvements." That's what screwing up Xorg for probably half the PCs out there will do to you, O Xorg developers who decided that working Intel video is for other people, meaning people who don't have Intel video chips embedded in their PCs.

Can you tell I'm bitter? I thought you could.

Of course with the super-fast USB 3 on the horizon for Linux — yep, first for Linux and then for the other 99 percent of the world, I expect we'll be getting more USB-connected hardware and not less, and that includes add-on network adapters, which I suspect will be with us in various forms for quite awhile as PCs' built-in networking (wired and wireless) are superseded by newer devices and protocols.

I'll continue testing the Airlink 101 AWLL3028 USB adapter and even consider entering the modern era and slapping Ubuntu 9.10 on this laptop. I'll try an in-place upgrade from 8.04-8.10-9.04-9.10, and if that doesn't work I can do a reintall with a fresh 9.10. That'll keep me (and my office's ample bandwidth) busy for awhile, I suspect.

I'm always hopeful; "It's only one crash," I say to myself. But one crash usually begets many more. I say usually hoping for the unusual and simultaneously wondering to myself why things have to be this hard (and remembering that these kind of problems reared themselves very well during my time running Windows 98/2000/XP and Mac OS 7.6/9.x/10.x).

Right now with the built-in wired networking, this hardware/software setup is pretty much problem-free (OK ... suspend/resume is a disaster, but I wasn't expecting anything more with hardware of this now-7-year-old vintage).

It's a good time to put my optimism hat atop my head, leave the friendly confines of the Ubuntu LTS behind and leap into the world of the six-month upgrade cycle and hope that improvements drown out regressions.

After all, I can always initiate my own regression and return to 8.04 (or chuck it all for something safe like Slackware 12.2 ...). I called Slackware "safe." Time for more coffee.

I don't begin to fully understand how computer networking works, but I can pretty much hack my way through it. (My networking "goal" is to set up VNC over the Internet ... but that's light years ahead of where I am today.) And I'm sure I've had this very same problem before (and should probably just try to find an earlier blog entry with the very same problem/solution instead of reinventing a very squeaky, annoying wheel with all you dear readers.

But if I'm having this problem again, chances are some of you might have it, too. And I don't think it's confined to OpenBSD. This could potentially crop up in any number of Linux distributions.

Here's the problem: For the past few days, my OpenBSD laptop has been slow as sludge in the browser (Firefox and Opera are the same in this regard).

But a speed test or a download of a large file shows no connection problem or speed problem at all.

So what is making my Web browsing so slow?

The answer: A bad nameserver in my /etc/resolv.conf file.

You see, I don't use this laptop in a single location. I have it at home, at the office, at Starbucks, and any number of places in between where I connect either wirelessly or with wired Ethernet.

And I usually do it with dynamic IPs, meaning I have OpenBSD set to get a dynamic IP address from the router providing me with networking, be it my home router or any other.

And my home router, a recent Netgear model, doesn't just pass through the two nameservers from my ISP that I have programmed into it. Instead it gives my laptop the nameserver address 192.168.1.1 (the same IP address as the router itself). I assume that the router is making some kind of translation and pushing the nameserver data through the 192.168.1.1 IP address to my laptop.

For the most part this works. And forgive me if the following explanation is either totally wrong or just incomplete. I'm explaining it the way I understand it, and I welcome your clarification and correction:

Usually when a router sets up a dynamic connection, it sends the router's gateway IP to the local machine, assigns the machine its own IP address and provides nameserver data (i.e. the IP address of the nameserver) as well.

So the local machine now knows the router/gateway address (and subnet), local IP address and nameserver address.

But ... one of the networks to which I connect is a bit old school. The router gives me a dynamic IP but doesn't send nameserver data. It assumes that the local machine already has nameserver data entered into the system and doesn't modify /etc/resolv.conf at all. Hence my old nameserver IP address — 192.168.1.1 — is still at the top of /etc/resolv.conf, with my "real" DNS nameserver IPs below it.

And the reason it takes so long for Web pages to appear is that the system is trying to resolve every alphanumeric HTTP address through a DNS server that on this other local network doesn't even exist.

Once I deleted the nonexistent nameserver address from my /etc/resolv.conf and had two "good" nameservers at the top of the file, everything started flowing as fast as it should.

Analysis: This problem stems from using DHCP to connect at multiple physical sites, and the slight differences in the DHCP protocol at those various locations is what's making my Web browsing slow down when /etc/resolv.conf is not properly configured for a given location.

The best "solution" is to always connect with a static IP on the router that doesn't transmit new nameserver IPs to my client computer.

In OpenBSD as I have it configured, I do all my network "tweaking" with text files, principally /etc/resolv.conf and /etc/hostname. (in my case /etc/hostname.rl0 /etc/hostname.wi0 and /etc/hostname.rum0 for the three wireless interfaces I have, one wired and two wireless; yes, the BSDs deal with networking a bit differently than Linux, and I've learned a lot by doing all of this manually).

I generally have each "hostname" file filled with a few lines for the various routers I use (with appropriate DHCP or static IP info and any SSID names and WEP or WPA keys needed), and I "pound out" (or "comment out") the lines I don't need. The problem is that I don't keep as close of an eye on /etc/resolv.conf, which is being changed by some of these DHCP servers and not by others.

Without any GUI tools such as the NetworkManager in GNOME, which I've used in Ubuntu and Debian, I either need to be much more mindful of what my configuration files contain at any given time, or I need to write/beg/borrow/steal some shell scripts that allow both the /etc/hostname.X files and /etc/resolv.conf to be modified by me when I decide to connect to one network or another. For instance, I could have the script give me a menu of networks and then modify the configuration files appropriately.

As it is, in Debian and Ubuntu, I often had to go to the NetworkManager to pick a new "location," of which I had many set up just like in this script I envision.

If only there was such a tool already in OpenBSD that would do this for me without needing GNOME, KDE or .... It could already be there and I just don't know about it.

I fondly remember the netconfig script in Slackware, which is one of the simple but supremely useful things I love about that Linux distribution. I'd love something like that in OpenBSD, but hacking into the text files isn't that big of a deal.

And I'll probably avoid the one local network that has DHCP but doesn't send its own nameserver IPs to the client.