Current location:	Home
Current mood:	annoyed
Entry tags:	linux, rants, windows

So who here decides where to connect?..
One thing I absolutely love about Linux is control - the system is built by the distribution maintainers when you install it, but from there, it's up to you to tell it how to work (should you not be satisfied with the way it operates already). You can go as far as making automatic scripts to control your graphical applications over DCOP without having to be a great programmer. Today I witnessed yet again how deeply can you control your Linux system in comparison to the Vista I have on another laptop.

For the past months, I've had many annoying problems with the wireless networking and the wireless bridge we (me and my brother) have established between the houses - it was hell unstable. Recently, as we switched channels, things seemed to have gotten worse - the wireless network within my apartment became unstable! The signal quality was jumping between 0 and 15% sometimes, regardless of the laptop being a few inches away from the access point itself! Such low signal quality resulted in frequent disassociations and I had no explanation to that. It was hard to believe that the neighboring networks were causing the disruption, especially since scans with airodump didn't reveal any intense activity on the same channel.

After looking at the scanner today, I've noticed that people have this interesting nature of starting from the default channel, which is 6, and always go up - to 7, 11, 13. I don't know how non-accidental this habit is, but looks like the area near my living place works this way. This was a good thing, as that would leave channel 1 completely empty. This channel is the only non-overlapping channel that remained untried, so I've decided to see how well my WiFi connectivity will hold before all the network switches again.

The setup was quite simple: one access point remains on channel 11 and maintains a bridge to the "House of the Internet", an old Linksys router, connected to the access point with a LAN cable, would maintain a network on channel 1 to which my laptops would connect. Same network name and encryption settings for ease of use and switching.

When it was time to configure my laptops to connect to the router on channel 1, I came to a conclusion that I have no idea how to set a preferred channel or BSSID on Windows - the configuration windows wouldn't let me specify this information anywhere! I've tried all my way from the Network and Sharing Center to the Configuration dialog of the wireless device itself and the only channel settings I found there were for Ad-Hoc networks... Next thing was to try the command-line - netsh. I've spent quite a while, playing with that command and at the same time, looking for some help on how to connect to specific channel/BSSID, but it appeared that these settings were nowhere to be found. netsh wlan show networks mode=bssid did show that there were two nodes to my wireless network, but according to netsh wlan show interfaces, Windows was connecting to the wrong one. That wasn't as annoying as realizing later that the connect command (that connects you to a wireless network) accepts only the name you gave your network on Windows, SSID which is the actual network name and interface (your WiFi adapter)... that's it. No channel, no BSSID, no nothing.

Now I have two laptops sitting in front of me - one is running Linux, which I've long ago managed to connect to the right access point by typing sudo iwconfig eth1 channel 1 ap xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx, and one is running Windows Vista, which is still connected to the wrong access point due to signal superiority, and there seems to be no way to make it switch from within the OS! And after all this, I also hear that Windows is more user-friendly than Linux. I guess there are sub-definitions for the word "user", then, because to me, it's anything but friendly - it's not flexible enough to be friendly and was probably coded to think that I - the user - am too dumb to decide which BSSID or wireless channel to connect to.

Hopefully, a new version of Kubuntu will come out soon, deal with the problems I have and I will finally regain control over my new laptop to make it do what I want for a change.