Re: Laptop Connects to WAP, But Cannot Access 'Net

On 04/01/2012 12:59 PM Rich Shepard wrote:
> On Sat, 31 Mar 2012, John Crowhurst wrote:
>
>> route tells you what gateway IP address you have. Its pointless pinging
>> 10.5.70.1 if the gateway IP is 10.5.70.254
>
>     Just back from another unsuccessful attempt at the coffee shop.
>
>     When the system boots it connects automatically to the shop's wifi server.
> The ESSID is 'WEBbeans-Silk Espresso', 'ifconfig wlan0' returns the IP
> address 10.5.70.104, broadcast address 10.5.70.255, and netmask
> 255.255.255.0.
>
>     The kernel routing table (displayed in response to 'netstat -r') has 2
> pairs os entries (default and broadcast) for the eth0 and wlan0 interfaces.
> For wlan0,
> default		10.5.70.1
> 10.5.70.0	*
>
>     /etc/resolv.conf -- SET BY THE WIRELESS SERVER -- shows
> nameserver 8.8.8.8
> nameserver 8.8.4.4
>
> These are Google's nameservers so the WEBbean.com network does not provide
> their own DNS servers.
>
>     The access card instructions are to make the connection, then invoke a
> browser to enter the provided password and accept their terms and conditions
> of use to be allowed access to the 'Net.
>
>     This is where something is broken. No Web page loads with firefox-11.0,
> opera-10.61, links, or lynx. Can't load the access page, www.webbeans.com,
> or any other page.

Did you try
	http://10.5.70.1
or
	http://10.5.70.1:8080
with firefox? If DNS access is shut off, firefox of course
can't use a named domain. Easy to forget in haste ;-)

It is possible to use telnet to simulate an http client, step by step
E.g. it might be interesting to see if
	telnet 10.5.70.1 80
(not :80, space 80, a second parameter)
connects. That is the first step your browser would do, try to connect.
If no go, try port 8080 also just for grins, like
	telnet 10.5.70.1 8080
if you get a connection, firefox should also connect, but could fail
in a subsequent step. Trying with telnet will tell us whether something
is willing to connect via port 80 or 8080, even if we can't get it to do
anything else.

If telnet connects, it should look something like (did this a while ago ;-)
<pre><code>
+----------------------------------------------+
| [20:03 ~/bin]$ telnet 192.168.0.1 80         |
| Trying 192.168.0.1...                        |
| Connected to 192.168.0.1.                    |
| Escape character is '^]'.                    | The server connect response ends here
| HEAD / HTTP/1.0                              | I typed this line. This asks for meta-data re the root url, not the data.
|                                              | (think you might need to hit Enter twice)
| HTTP/1.0 200 OK                              | This could be various reject codes also
| Server:                                      |   e.g. 401 for unauthorized, etc.
| Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1  |
| Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2002 21:18:16 GMT          |
| Last-Modified: Sat, 01 Aug 2009 04:38:43 GMT |
| Accept-Ranges: bytes                         |
| Connection: close                            |
| Content-Length: 522                          | We could come back with a GET instead of HEAD request,
|                                              |   to get those 522 bytes but leave that for firefox, unless it complains.
| Connection closed by foreign host.           | Server closing is normal when transaction is complete, I believe.
|                                              |
+----------------------------------------------+
</code></pre>
Hope the above is not hellaciously wrapped and interlaced ;-) Maybe view source if so?

Of course you won't be using 192.168.0.1,
which is my local gateway, and that's my router's
"web server" answering, not your coffee shop's proxy server.

HTH -- at least we should know for sure if anything's listening
after the WiFi connects.

Regards,
Bengt Richter

>
>     As before, cannot ping any address on the local Class A network (nor any
> world-addressible domain name or IP address). Trying to ping the gateway
> (10.5.70.1) results in 'Destination unreachable'; trying the namesever
> (8.8.8.8) results in 'Destination not reachable'.
>
>     With an IP address, DNS servers, and gateway all assigned by the local
> server, what might inhibit loading the 'Net access control page or any other
> web page?
>
> Rich