So how was your evening?

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

I spent most of last night fighting with my stupid wireless card! Actually, no, the wireless card was fine it was the stupid Configuration Utility that is supposed to work hand in hand with it that I was fighting with. It seems that a few days ago the Config Utility decided to load as a background process, it would run and show up on my list of processes but it would never open up for me to make any changes to it. After several uninstalls/installs it finally showed up again as something I could make changes to, but with the bizarre side effect of not listing any available access points. It’s like this, when I start the laptop, the card connects to the AP, and I have an internet connection. After a while, especially in my house where the signals get noisy every once in awhile, I lose the connection. I used to be able to fix that by going to the Config Utility and clicking connect on the AP in the list of available APs and it would force a reconnect and everything would be fine. Only now, when I go to the list of available APs, there’s nothing there. In fact, even on boot, when the connection is working, the “Link Info” page doesn’t have a SSID listed, even though it clearly says it’s connected to something!

The final straw was when I went into Net Stumbler to see if the SSID and/or AP showed up there only to discover that it didn’t recognize that I had a wireless card any longer. It would recognize it if I unplugged it and plugged it back in while Net Stumbler was running, but not until then, and even then it would only list the MAC address of the AP, not the SSID. (And it still wouldn’t list the wireless card as an available device, it just connected to vapor, apparently. *L*)

So I’m left to assume that my AP has stopped transmitting it’s SSID, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is sort of a pain to the way I was used to doing things! Not to mention the fact that I haven’t done anything to the AP that would have caused it to stop, which makes it all the more puzzling. And that Netstumbler is just going to be more of a pain than it’s worth if I keep having to unplug the card to get it to work at all.

Gee all of this stuff worked fine just a few days ago!

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