02 Wireless Woes - Part I

In keeping with posting all aspects of my learning, this post will deal with my experience in setting up the Gumstix for use with my home router, along with some very odd issues along the way.

The day we received the Gumstix system, I wasn't present during the demonstration. I was informed, however, that the system was up and running on the college wireless network, with a computer connection via serial, within moments, and was scanning Bluetooth devices nearby with equal ease - excellent, I thought to myself.
That night when I arrived home, I attempted to get the system working with my home router, optimistic that it would work right off. Of course it didn't.
I'll hold up my hands and admit that I was being foolish in thinking I could plug it in and all would be well, obviously there would be some issues with WEP keys and the rest. So, just to ensure that I could get wireless working at all, I turned off my router's encryption for a few minutes and, low and behold, the Gumstix picked it up and connected. I SSHed in, messed about for a minute to make sure all was well, and then exited.
So ended my first foray into Gumstix wireless.

Yesterday, having downloaded buildroot on my laptop's Ubuntu, I decided to get a simple "hello world" cross compiled, to put onto the Gumstix, to make sure all was well. Once again, I disabled the router's encryption, and fired up the Gumstix; everything working again. However, it turns out that the buildroot download was not successful and my little program failed to compile, so I set about downloading buildroot again, and turned off the Gumstix for the night. Unfortunately, I forgot to reset the router's encryption. Not that big a problem, as long as some unscrupulous individual doesn't notice, but it seems to have lead, indirectly at least, to some rather annoying issues, as will be described in part II.

The following morning my dad mentioned, in passing, that the wireless wasn't working, so I reset the router's encryption and set about getting the Gumstix working on it. A bit of searching through Nabble's Gumstix forum lead to this post. Given this information, I commented out this given line in /etc/network/interfaces:

pre-up /sbin/iwconfig $IFACE essid any txpower 100mW

and replaced it with:

pre-up /sbin/iwconfig $IFACE key XXXXXXX key open essid "My_Network" txpower 100mW

as was advised in the above linked post. It worked like a charm, and I was up and running on my router. God bless Dave Hylands, I can see his (many) posts helping me more than this one time.

Next up was getting a static IP working on the system.