Fixing my SUSE wireless LAN problem
by Volker Weber
When I was young we used to play with Lego bricks. Today I play with software. It is really boring when everything is running so I tear it apart and rebuild it. Learn while you play.
I told you that I removed Fedora Core from one machine and replaced it with SUSE and on top of that Ximian Desktop. That worked very well - with one exception. I had to remove WEP encryption from my WLAN and rely on MAC address filters to control access to the network. Not terribly secure but I have a VPN layer to protect the data.
So I was wondering why I could not get WEP to work and I configured the card using YaST2 numerous times. Then I worked directly with the config files. Whatever I tried, it did not work. If at first you don't succeed, try again. As you remove layers of abstraction, you get to the more basic stuff. I then tried to load the WLAN card with a different set of parameters using iwconfig but the system could not find it. Locate/updatedb failed as well. While trying to hunt down the utility it suddenly hit me. Could I possible not have installed the wireless-tools package? Bingo. Now wouldn't it be great if the higher level tools would spot that error and suggest the installation of the missing package? They probably could. But that take all the fun out of this adventure game. Then I might as well just use Macs only.
Note so self: The minimal installation does not contain wireless-tools.
Comments
That's an excellent example of what we call an "leaking abstraction". And the moment in time that seperates men from boys. There is an excellent article about leaking abstraction on "Joel on Software": http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html
;-) stw
