Connecting to the Wireless Network

Overview for all wireless card types and OS's

• There are three things that are required to have your wireless card work on the Old Westbury wireless network:
  • You need to set your ssid to unsecure_ow or oldwestbury
  • Your card must be set to infrastructure ONLY mode, not ad-hoc or peer-to-peer or any mix thereof.
• Go to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com and make sure you have ALL critical patches installed.
• If things don't work, go to the website of your card manufacturer and get the newest driver for your card. If you have built in wireless, find the newest wireless driver for your laptop at the website of your laptop's manufacturer.

Wireless Network Information

Old Westbury has 3 wireless networks available:
oldwestbury
unsecure_ow
oldwestbury_staff

Students can connect to oldwestbury, or unsecure_ow

Note: the SSID are a case sensitive.

**The SSID that you should be connecting to in the academic village especially in D190 St. George students is the unsecure_ow

The IP address range that a client would get via DHCP for the unsecure_ow WLAN is 172.16.x.x 255.255.0.0

The IP address range that a client would get via DHCP for the oldwestbury is 137.139.x.x 255.255.255.0

Configuring XP for Wireless

Turn off bridging

Some people have had problems because XP makes it very easy to "bridge" your network cards, which you generally do not want to do. Turning off bridging is easy--go to Start\Connect To\Show All Network Connections (or, if this doesn't show up on your computer, Start\Control Panel\Network And Internet Connections\Network Connections). For your wireless card, remove it from the bridge as shown below, by right-clicking on it and choosing Remove From Bridge

Update Your Wireless Drivers
If things are not working for you after you have set things up as described, newer drivers will very often help. Go to the website of the manufacturer of your wireless card and get the newest drivers. If you have built-in wireless, get the drivers from the website of your laptop's manufacturer. A few possibilities (these direct links may be changed by the manufacturer at any time, of course..):

http://www.cisco.com/public/sw-center/sw-wireless.shtml
http://www.linksys.com/products/group.asp?grid=33&scid=36
http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/broadbandnetworking/10_DLoadMain.mspx
http://support.dell.com/
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=DRVR-MATRIX

Note about driver updates: many vendors package their drivers with a separate program to configure your network card--for example, Cisco installs something called the "Cisco Aironet Configuration Utility" or ACU. You don't need and really generally don't want the configuration program. You want Windows to control your wireless card. If you can opt to install ONLY drivers, do this. If not, either uninstall the configuration program afterword or start the configuration program and tell it you want Windows to control your wireless card.

Restart the Wireless Zero Configuration Service

This may or may not be a "real" fix, but it will frequently make things work if they have stopped working or if you have made changes to your wireless configuration and want to see what happens without having to reboot. Just shut down and restart the Wireless zero config by going to control panel/Administrative tools/Services, and right-clicking on the "Wireless Zero Configuration", and telling it to stop. After it stops, right-click on it again, and tell it to start, and then wait a minute or so and see what happens.

While you're at it, you can try running "ipconfig" from Start/Run to try to wake up windows networking if the wireless zero restart alone does not help.

XP Wireless Configuration Screen Shots

Right-click on icon at bottom right of screen.

Choose View available networks (Note: if this does not work, double-click on the wireless icon, click on "Properties," and go to step 4)

Select "unsecure_ow" with the "chess pawn" and then click on "Advanced."

Check "Use Windows to configure my wireless network settings." Make sure unsecure_ow with the chess pawn icon is in your preferred networks. If it is not, click "Add (see below figure 1)
Remove others, especially if they have the card icon. Click on "Advanced"

(Figure 1) If you have to "Add" "unsecure_ow", set Network Authentication to "Open," set Data Encryption to "Disabled" and fill in unsecure_ow for the SSID. Click OK to return to Wireless Network Connection Properties. NOTE: This dialog may look different, depending on which patches you have installed.

Set your card to Infrastructure Only mode. **IMPORTANT** Click Close.