Thursday, June 05, 2003
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 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 house tonight, trying to get access to his WAP.
His setup requires WEP. 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 ...
