[ale] multiple network setups (wireless)?

[Byron A Jeff]

On Fri, Nov 19, 2004 at 10:23:47PM -0500, Jay Loden wrote:
> I have a wireless laptop running Debian (mepis linux, technically) and I use 
> it at work/school and at home.   At home, I have no encryption, since I use 
> MAC address filtering. 

You still should enable WEP. Wandering folks can pick out your data stream from
out of thin air. Without encription, it could plain text.

> At school, however, we have 128 bit WEP.  Does anyone on the list know how to 
> get it so that when I boot, it can figure out where I am and configure 
> accordingly, or alternatively how I can get grub to boot to a specific net 
> configuration? 

It's a problem I started working on a while ago. But then I switched laptops
and upgraded and the script is archived somewhere. Basically I modified the
/etc/pcmcia/wireless script that runs upon wireless card detection to
try to connect to each network I was interested in. It worked in principal
but I never got it cleaned up.

> 
> I currently just let the network auto-detect fail, then manually run a script 
> that sets iwconfig options and then does an "ifup eth0" at the end.  This is 
> hackish and while it works, I'd like to find out how one goes about doing 
> this the "right" way.  Thanks for the input!

It works. So it's the right way. It's just not automatic. 

BTW on my new laptop, I do it the same way. It's not great but it works.

Maybe if I ever get a minute I may get back to it.

One trick that I've employed is to set up home with the same WEP name and
key as school. Then there's only one "network" to connect to.

BAJ