[olpc-help] Using the free wifi at a café

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Molly wrote:
> I have a question about getting my XO to use the free wifi at a local cafe. They have an open access point which directs your web browser to a page where you must log in. My XO s-l-o-w-l-y tried every network in range, finally did connect to the cafe's wireless router, and then nothing. Neither Browse nor Opera would find that log in page--they gave Page Not Found errors. I tried for about 15 minutes and then gave up.

I had a similar experience at a Kinko's with my T-Mobile account. It
took me a long time to get the wireless connection. It looked to me like
the XO was setting the mesh network up first and looking for other XOs
before attempting to do anything else. So I went into the "Neighborhood"
panel and clicked on the T-Mobile circle, and then it abandoned all its
fooling around looking for other XOs and connected to T-Mobile.

Once it connected, I opened the browser, which defaults to the "OLPC
Library", which is a file *on* the XO, not an external Internet site. So
I entered an external web site and got re-directed to the T-Mobile web
site. I logged in, and it took *another* long time before it returned to
my T-Mobile home page. I didn't want to spend the time messing with it
at Kinko's, so I just verified that I could surf to another page, which
also took a long time.

When I get some free time next weekend, I'm planning to load some
network performance monitoring tools on it and see exactly what's going
on. This is what I do for a living (well, not network-specific, but
Linux performance engineering) so I can find the tools.

One of them is called "iperf", which measures the bandwidth between two
machines. It's definitely in the "yum" repository. If anyone is
interested, go to http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/ for the details.