Well, I’m visiting my mother-in-law, and just for fun, I decided to fire up the laptop and see if there were any local, open, wireless connections. I had to move around the apartment a few times, but eventually, there came the magic listings: two different entries named “linksys”. Standard essid, probably all the other settings standard… that is, unencrypted.
Yup.
For reference, I find that it does help to set the nick as well as the essid. I used:
# iwconfig wlan0 nick linksys
# iwconfig wlan0 mode managed
# iwconfig wlan0 essid linksys
# ifconfig wlan0 up
# dhcpcd wlan0
… and that does it. I have found that I need to set the nick before the essid, or it doesn’t seem to want to work.
Unfortunately, I found that to get a strong enough connection to actually ping anything or get online, I have to sit in this one precise spot in the corner of the living/dining room, with the laptop perched on my knees.
Lesson: It is a lot more convenient to have your own wireless connection than to try to leech off one that is probably way across the parking lot. ;-)
that’s awesome. ‘way to use your resources.