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

[7150]

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> 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.
> 
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Interesting. I've been out several times to two different sites with
great results. I have done nothing but start the browser, go to T-Mobile
login, enter a URL and browse. Speed seems perfectly normal.

George

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