WIFI Settings

[Jossy Barron]

Does anyone know of any sure fire way of connecting to the Uni Wifi as it seems to be hit and miss with some people and totally fails with others. I have heard it mentioned you need specific proxies in place? Anyone have the information in regards to that?

cheers
Jossy

[John Sutherland]

I s'pose I'll find out what Snow Leopard will do for me. Probably need to get one of these glued mashed tree and ink doo-dahs with lots of static words and pictures and read it on the train. I'm gonna reinstall the OS on her box and try one last time. Interesting how the Apple girl said there are more problems getting home wifi connect in the UK than in the USA. My other option is I bought a bus wifi connect. It - like my daughter's PC laptop - has room for up to four WEP keys. I note that her WEP connect uses four different(!) keys. Although only one matches the one on the wifi-router and none match the one on the modem base. Wifi is such a typical Computing product ...

[Jossy Barron]

it may look the same but its not, its a complete re-write of some of the base code streamlining it and making everything faster. your startup and shutdown for example should be much faster. Also using certain programs etc. As for virgin, i am very pleased to say i am not, with bskyb atm :)

[John Sutherland]

Are you on Virgin? Does it make any difference that my daughter is using OSX10.4.11? (I have just upgraded to Snow Leopard, and it looks and acts exactly the same as Leopard! Not exactly £7.50 well spent IMHO.)

[Jossy Barron]

i use a linksys router with my mac and no problems there. It was the uni wifi that was the probelm as always and it was down again this week.

[John Sutherland]

Oh yes, Virgin's depth of tech support was: turn Airport off and on; still not working?; then call Apple. Best advice was from a girl on the phone from the Apple Store in Glasgow. Very friendly, had had the same problems, said it was worse in the UK than in the USA (she was American), Linksys routers were the biggest problems (for apple computers) but Belkin caused everyone problems. She just kept doing things for 2-3 hours until wifi worked. This is why I pay slightly over the odds and use BT as my provider: it works ...

[John Sutherland]

the problem is that there is no agreed IEEE wifi standard. So everyone plays it slightly differently. I have no problem connecting to the Internet from my Macbook Pro via a BT modem/wifi/router. However, my daughter has a nightmare doing the same via a Virgin modem + Linksys wifi router. Apple blame Virgin blame Apple. Turns out it is hit and miss, and nobody is quite sure why. Probably something to do with exceptions to the wifi connection. Oh for the days when RS232 was RS232 was RS232.

In short, there is no wifi standard that anyone agrees to abide by. Until then, we take our chances. All the best, and, if you can get a Macbook to talk to a Virgin broadband via wifi, call me ...

[Jossy Barron]

okies, so you need to have an auto proxy detection on with this http://ww.uws.ac.uk/wpad.dat thanks ross

[Peter Bloomfield]

My laptop used to have instant BSOD if I connected to uni wifi. Of course, that was shortly before the whole thing died due to hard drive corruption... chicken & egg...

[Johnny G]

The link I posted is to get the proxy information. It used to be freely available in a .pdf file but that has been taken down (to stop people who shouldnt be on the network?) so it looks like you must mail them to get this .pdf now. I set up a mac after following the guide and it works perfectly.

[Jossy Barron]

thanks for the response, however what i was asking for was specific information in regards to the proxies in the uni, to browse the web you require either specific proxy information or auto proxy detection turned on and since the auto detect wasnt working thats what i wanted to know. However in chatting to one of the lecutrers yesterday he was saying that the wifi isnt working properly for the last few days anyway.