Re: WiFi

[Chuck Yerkes <chuck+obsd@Oct2003.snew.com>]

Quoting Dave Feustel (dfeustel@mindspring.com):
> I'm now accessing the internet via wifi on my 3.3 openbsd laptop.

Woo Hoo!
> The main problem that I am having is frequent disconnects.
> This in spite of the fact that I am using the Engenius hipower
> pcmcia card and I'm close to the access point hardware.

Woo Hoo! again.

What's the access point?

> I wonder if the 300 MHz clock speed of my laptop is not fast
> enough to maintain the WiFi connection. What other possibilities
> might explain the frequent disconnects?

My 133Mhz Soekris as an AP does fine.
My 300MHz Powerbook does fine.
My P/233 Sony running FreeBSD did fine.
A 300MHz work Dell running Windows both times it was
  on did fine (proprietary VPN when the SSH tunnel was closed).

I'm hoping that stumbler will work for you...
I'm not on an openbsd machine but it's likely in /usr/ports/net/*stumbler.

I use it on my Zaurus and my Mac, but the Mac shows signal strength
on the top bar.  Stumbler will show you APs and their Sig/Noise ratios.

Handy tool.

My Apple airport had sucky strength even next to it.  Then it died.
Fortunately, it was a bad capacitor and was replaced for free by
Apple (even after a couple years).  By then I had my Soekris
setup as an AP.

> I'm using T-mobile and there is no encryption whatsoever.
> Any way to get some privacy using a vpn to an openbsd system?

Yes.  IPSec or even PoPToP.

Spinning keys seems to be a way around the WEP problem.  LEAP
appears to be Cisco proprietary, but there are open standards
(AFAIK) that are out there that are not implemented.

Setting up ALTQ access to minimal unless you're coming from an
IPSec connection works (and block port 25 totally for all, you may
authenticate to send mail on 587).