Category: WiFi

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Having to find multiple levels of internet access — oh, fun!

Disclaimer: I am musing on the challenges I faced while trying to secure reliable internet I required during a recent set of business trips, and the process of developing various solutions to these challenges. These challenges are, in a general fashion, typical of the routine logistical challenges I face when in-the-field, and no doubt of other field technicians. In no way am I trying to reflect negatively on my employer, who for the purposes of this entry shall remain nameless.

I was recently on a couple of business trips, depending on an iPad as a critical part of the execution of the contract. This trip was to a small city of 25,656 (according to Wikipedia), big enough to have plenty of internet access points, cell phones, and cell phone data. As far as I was concerned, in fact, I was in a mini-mini version of Montreal, home for me, to those who haven’t figured it out yet.

The way the iPad is set up, wifi internet access is required to transfer building plans needed to do the work to the iPad, and transfer back files and data collected from my field work. I have made no bones mentioning to some key people heading the overall project that this is a potential Achilles’ Heel to the execution of the project, since, at least in the overall project’s fringe locations sufficiently beyond population centres, internet access would be a spotty luxury at best. My trips were at least symbolically close enough to the edges, underlining the potential problem.

One of the first challenges I found was that the iPad didn’t seem to play well with the internet supplied in the motel (DataValet); although I did manage to get it to work once, it proved a bit too frustrating to get working reliably. A colleague confirmed that he’d had similar problems getting Apple products to connect to DataValet. I had no trouble getting my personal computer running Fedora 21 Workstation to work with DataValet: In fact, besides not recalling having trouble over the years connecting to wifi that wasn’t specific to Linux or Fedora, I would actually say that the experience was even easier than in the past, since the daily leases seemed to automatically renew, although it seemed to insinuate itself by a “convenient” automatic popup window. In parallel, my work Windows-based machine also worked flawlessly throughout with DataValet, although if I remember correctly, I may have had to occasionally open up a browser in order to renew the leases.

Add to this challenge, my employer’s local office didn’t seem to have wifi, or at least, assuming that it *was* there as a hidden network, my work computer didn’t automatically connect to the corporate wifi when not plugged in to the corporate network, which it normally does at my home office.

My first solution was to fulfill a purpose of my having asked for a company smart phone in 2014: Create a hot spot using the data plan on my work phone to do data transfers when not in a wifi zone that works well for the iPad. However, it seemed, between the picture-heavy data and the fact that the iPad seems to do automatic background backups when hooked up to internet — a feature to which I initially had a (negative) knee-jerk reaction that nonetheless actually was useful at one point and since — my phone appeared to run out of my data plan for the month, as evidenced by the sudden stop of internet connection through the phone while still operating just fine as a phone. Having quickly checked the phone’s data usage logs and determining that I’d certainly gotten to the neighbourhood of the limit I believed I had (2 gigs), I assumed that the phone’s contract had a limit set by my employer to turn off the data plans until the month rolls over in order to avoid overage charges. I later learned, upon my return home and standing in front of the IT tech responsible for the corporate cell phones, that the problem was presumed to be an unusual set of settings probably set by some esoteric app (of which I have have very few, esoteric or otherwise, on my work phone), or possibly a SIM card problem, which turned on off the phone’s data capabilities, and that in any case the company has no such policy to ask the cell service provider to turn off a phone’s data access when it reaches the limit of “included data” in the plan, until the rollover date. The lack of internet on the phone is “solved” by resetting the phone to factory settings; I should get instructions on how to do it in the future should I be faced with the problem again. 🙂

This led to a second solution: I used my personal phone to create a hotspot and consumed a bit of my personal data plan, which didn’t bother me too much, at least until it were to involve overage charges. Not that I checked, but based on the little amount of time I used it, I’m sure I never got into that area.

The next solution also created another challenge due to a flub on my part: My client finally gave wifi access to the iPad at her various locations; however, I should have requested that she also enable my work computer, since I had a secondary need for internet given that I developed a need to produce or modify extra plans several times once arriving at some sites, and as such a need to transfer the plans off the computer and onto the iPad.

Finally, I realized that when I have wired access, I had yet another solution available to me: I could set up my linux laptop to create a wifi hotspot. This was rather easy, at least under the current gnome version in Fedora 21 and I believe has been for quite a while under the gnome 3.0 series, and probably before too. Unfortunately, this was wasn’t a solution at the motel since it only had wifi and no wired access, and I didn’t have an external wifi receiver with a cord to provide the wired internet and free up the wifi card.

Here are some screenshots of how easy it is to setup a wifi hotspot under Gnome 3:

step 1

step 2

step 3

step 4

step 5

Feeling a bit curious along the lines of “shouldn’t this be relatively easy under Windows, too?”, I checked on my work computer, and while it seemed possible, and indeed my brother once did it for me with his Windows computer, it was not obvious at all; in fact, I gave up after about four or five click-throughs with little end in sight.

Hence, at the local office and having set up my laptop to create a local wifi hotspot, I’d created a mildly-amusing-to-me setup on my temporary desk, plugging in my personal laptop to the corporate network, running a hotspot using its wifi card, and using my work computer normally over wifi as well as doing data transfers from the iPad.

Back at home and at my home office, I mention my difficulties in getting internet access to my supervisor (who isn’t a computer techie type), who thought that creating a hotspot under Windows couldn’t be done, or at least he didn’t realize it could be.

Further discussing this with him, I explained the situation saying “I don’t mind trying to find other solutions — that *is* my job — but after not having two A Plans (the motel internet not working for the iPad, nor having wifi at the office), then suddenly not having a plan B (the company cell phone internet not working), having to depend on my personal phone’s data plan, then having to depend on the client’s internet access but not having enough access for all devices, and finally coming up with a part-time solution to replace one of the A-plans — using a second of my personal resources in the form of my personal laptop — there’s a problem here,” to which he agreed.

Jovially, he did however suggest that “in the next leg of your travels, I happen to know that if you can go to the local library, they have free wifi”. This made me realize that if necessary and if possible, I could also try the free wifi at the local Tim Hortons (a popular Canadian chain of coffee and doughnut shops), assuming that there is one in the remote town where I’ll be visiting next.

Which has me really thinking about the problem:

– not all the field techs in the company have smart phones with data plans, and as such not able to create a needed hotspot in order to enable the execution of a project;
– not all the field techs have personal smart phones with a data plan, nor should field techs in general be required to use their personal data plans, let alone go into overage charges, in order to enable the execution of a project;
– at least at first glance, it doesn’t seem to be a quick and easy thing to turn a windows machine into a hotspot in order to enable such work — and I don’t want to hear from the peanut gallery on this one, since I *know* that it *can* be done; my point is that at first glance, even a moderately savvy user such as myself shouldn’t have to say “It’s easy under Gnome 3, why isn’t it about as easy under Windows? Boy it’s a good thing that I had my personal laptop with me!” (On a side note, usually the stereotype is that “Windows is easy, and Mac easier, but isn’t Linux hard?” 🙂 )
– and, only a limited number of computer users are using Gnome 3, where it is easy to set up a hotspot if you either have a wired connection to the internet, or two wifi cards on your computer. (I’ll have to check with my brother, who uses XFCE on one of his laptops, which is on a technical level identical to mine, to see how easy it is under that desktop; obviously, it’s technically possible; I imagine it’s just a question of how easily different desktops enable the functionality.)

Which leads me back to the above-mentioned problem of “what do you do in remote, small villages where you don’t have a corporate office with wifi, motel / B&B internet access is spotty at best, there’s no cell phone coverage, and there are few if any public wifi spots like a restaurant or a public library?”

I just hope that the library’s free wifi isn’t provided by DataValet. 🙂

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Wireless under Fedora 11

Back in September, I cried for joy that wireless worked out of the box in F9, even if it was only 2 bars out of 4, inches away from the wireless router, and surmised that this might be due to a presumed lack of Ndiswrapper in the Fedora kernel, expecially since a plain old vanilla kernel downloaded from kernel.org gave me 4 bars. The number of bars and signal strength on my PIII 450 laptop varies from about 10% (zero bars but still connected) to about whatever 2 bars represents. On rare occasion I get 4 bars, which usually drops back down in seconds.

Under F11, things seem to be the same. No complaints.

Seems that I might not haven Fedora enough credit, if you can believe it.

On my new Acer Aspire One, I have 4 bars, all the time. And it’s about a foot or two further from the router than the PIII 450.

So it seems that it could be my card, the drivers available, and the age of the technology.

Good going Fedora!

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Well Hallelujah! Big Brother has finally acted!

I just checked into a motel today that not only has a password for its internet access, and not only a good, secure password, but — get this — it was automatically generated when I checked in and asked about internet access, and that everyone gets an unique password. They told me that it has an expiry time that I could choose when I first logged on; if I mistakenly chose one too short, I just would have to call the front desk for a new one. I know it’s unique to “me” because I’m using two laptops on this trip, my company machine for company business, and my personal laptop for personal stuff, and when I tested the original password on my personal machine after having used my company machine, I was told that the limit of accounts attached to the password had been reached, so I called the front desk and they gave me another one, no questions asked.

Some would say that the unique passwords could be a violation of my privacy. Possibly, if they happened to tie the password to my room; I don’t know if they have, but in this case … well, the conspiracy theorist in me has not been awakened (I know, famous last words. 🙂 ) I suppose I’m not fond of the notion that the unique password could be used to against me, including wrongly and/or maliciously.

However, I suspect that I’m safe; hotels are generally in the business of being discrete as part of their profit motive, so keeping track of who gets which password or derivative information about my internet use is, well, not generally in their interest. Then again, perhaps I should also be worried about the key card hotels give me and whether they are keeping track of how often I go in and out of the room, or use the pool, hot tub, exercise room or laundry room protected by the key cards. Ooops, they took down my name, address, and phone number, and they have credit card information linked to me when I signed in! My privacy has already been thrown out the window!

I shouldn’t be — I figure that this should be the norm — but I’m sincerely impressed that this hotel protects its business resources much the same way they they protect the others, such as the aforementioned rooms, pools, hot tubs, exercise rooms, laundry rooms, and the like.

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Hotel internet access passwords — Here’s a case for Captain Obvious

In the past 4 weeks I have spent as much time in my own bed at home as I normally spend in hotels for business over 6-12 months (about 4 nights.) As such I have been using a few hotel internet hookups.

First, the good news from Captain Obvious is that most hotels and motels in North America these days seem to have wireless internet. I know, I’ve been using hotel/motel wireless for about three years now, but now it’s so commonplace, that my experience last fall near Boston at an otherwise charming New England Inn where they used a large group of computer savvy geocachers as guinea pigs for their new wireless internet setup seems odd.

Next, to set the stage, Captain Obvious is observing that several years ago when people started getting wireless routers in their homes and offices and anywhere else, after a while people learned that they had to lock down their router with a password that nobody knows except, well, those with whom they wanted to share their bandwidth (and only those with whom they wanted to share their bandwidth), so that, well, you know, the neighbours don’t decide to save a few bucks on a cable modem and piggyback on yours. Or use so much of it that you start getting overage charges, assuming that their theft of your signal doesn’t significantly affect your use of your internet. Or that strange looking people don’t park in front of your house for hours on end for no apparent reason. Or worse yet, do so while doing things that would have the cops knocking down your door for doing things like, oh, who knows, downloading kiddie porn or spamming or hacking into financial institutions and stealing large sums of money.

Which makes me wonder about the all the hotels I’ve been staying at over the past month:

– The first one had a great, really secure password, that hadn’t been changed in over a year and a half.

– The next one used the hotel’s name with a few numbers added to the end. I don’t expect that they change it very often, if at all; I’ve used that hotel a couple of times over the past three weeks and I haven’t been told that the password has changed. The signals just work fine, and at the end of the week I think it’s even money that it still won’t have changed when I likely will go back to that hotel.

– The next one didn’t even have a password.

– The next one used its fax number as its password. Apparently the owner just recently acquired the establishment and at least has gotten to the point of pulling the plug on the router for a few minutes whenever he notices a suspicious character in his parking lot. There were anywhere from two to four other insecure networks in range, although one called itself “free public wireless”, and the other was a nearby internet café.

– The next one has two routers without a password, and there’s another insecure signal in range.

At each place I have implored the people at the front desk to please install a password and change it at least monthly if not weekly, or even have an unique key generated for each guest or at least each hour for whoever comes in during that period (OK, this is a bit too much Big Brother, but the day may come), and not use a dictionary word; of course two of the five are staffed by employees without any real influence over such matters, and at another I suspect much the same.

In general I wonder how hard it is to have a control panel to their router to change the password, that they remind themselves to do according to a schedule they can mark on their calendar, or they can ask their IT guy to set up a script to do it automatically according to whatever schedule the innkeeper chooses, and they just need a quick reference note to show up on their guest registration screen with the “internet password”. I know, I can’t do it, but I could even figure out how to do a cron job; surely in the MS world it’s easier than that.

I congratulated the first place for their excellent password but said that after a while all someone has to do is stay a night or speak with someone who has and they can get the password. Then they could easily set up a router in the bushes nearby and a few repeaters or a wire to their house a few doors down and bingo, who cares about the cops banging down the innkeeper’s door. The cops *know* that hotel guests will often use their trips to hotels to download things they might never do at home. However, the innkeeper is paying for some thief to reduce the service he’s supplying to his customers just to remain competitive. All he needs is the bad publicity from the cops knocking down his door or those of his clients because of someone in a van with a laptop, who can drive away when the sirens are heard down the street, is conducting some illicit business using a hijacked connection.

I can put up with the nuisance of a fist-time password challenge web page at a hotel. I understand that Friday evenings to Sunday mornings — and possibly other times during the week — there are a lot of guests at a hotel and the speed is likely to be slower as a result. But I wonder about how much slower it is because some industrious person may be hidden somewhere in the bushes or the parking lot, or have a series of repeaters running down the block and slowing down the access I’m paying for through my room rate. Or temporarily losing a connection because the innkeeper is “scaring off” a suspicious character in the parking lot by unplugging his router for a few minutes.

And the notion that my door conceivably *could* be knocked down for someone in the parking lot, or at least, I could be a spectator to such a thing and still be questioned, is less than savoury.

My complaints *are* rather petty compared to world hunger. But that’s not the point: It seems to me to be a good combination of due diligence and, well, good business sense, just to change the passwords on the first of the month, or every Monday. They put key-card locks to the pool, the whirlpool, the exercise room, and even the laundry room (that is coin-operated!) to limit access to their guests.

Why not do the same for their wireless internet?

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Fedora 9 wireless — out of the box!

One of the things I wanted my laptop to do this past weekend was have reliable wireless. Go figure, a bunch of computer-savvy geocachers invade a New-England Inn on the promise that “Oh yes, the internet works here, we’re setting it up just in time for you” and, whaddya know — they messed it up, and wireless internet is not to be found for most of the weekend. (sheesh)

Anyway, the first impressive thing is that out-of-the-box Fedora 9 recognizes my card and it works; at this point I’d finally put in a wireless router in the house. There’s only two out of four bars, even when the laptop is inches away from the router., but it’s already impressive that it works straight out of the box. Remember, this is Fedora, Ndiswrapper is not a part of the distribution. So Fedora has done a good job of integrating wireless.

Here’s the real clincher: my brother recompiles a vanilla kernel from kernel.org, and we’re going to do some tweaking to get the wireless stronger. Whaddya know, just compilling the latest kernel gives me four bars. I wonder if Ndiswrapper is there? Little matter.

Seems that 1) the Fedora people have done a really good job on its end of integrating wireless, 2) the Gnome desktop people have really done a good job at taking over and doing wireless, and 3) Linus et. al. are doing the right thing too.

Cool.