my WAP hates me

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Author: Eric Bishop
Date:  
Subject: my WAP hates me
David,

Try connecting via TFTP,

at a terminal type: tftp 192.168.1.1

If this works you are able to talk with the Linksys, then the next
question would be when using Linux to connect to the WAP/Router are you
using Mozilla or a browser that utilizes the Mozilla engine?

If you are there is a bug with some firmware versions of Linksys and
Mozilla, details below:

Linksys blue boxes have a webserver embedded in their firmware. The
normal way to administer one is to point a browser at its IP address on
your network. You program the box by filling out HTML forms.

This is a nice bit of design that neatly avoids having OS-specific
client software. But some older versions of the webserver firmware have
a quirk that interacts with a bug in Mozilla (at least at release 1.0.1)
to make the interface almost unusable. Fortunately, the recovery
procedure is trivial. This bug was known to be present as late as 1.40,
and also interfered with Netscape; it is absent in 1.44 and a good
reason to upgrade.

The symptom you're likely to see is a broken-image icon at the upper
left hand corner of each page. The broken image is a series of
file-folder tabs for an image map. That image map is how you get to the
other web pages.

You can recover by right-clicking on the broken-image icon. Select "View
Image", then back out. This will build the image map correctly.

You will almost always have to do this on the first page, but it often
won't trigger on later page loads.

Here's what's going on. Mozilla tries to stream multiple concurrent
requests at the webservers it talks to in order to speed up page
loading. The dimwitted little firmware webserver in the Linksys is only
single-threaded and doesn't handle concurrent requests. So there's a
race condition. When you hit the window just right, you get an aborted
request and a broken graphic.

Hope this helps, I have references of this information if interested,
just ask!

Eric Bishop


Most other browsers are immune to this problem. Konqueror doesn't
trigger it. Neither does Internet Explorer.
On Mon, 2003-08-18 at 22:10, David A. Sinck wrote:
> I just got what I had thought was a more or less nice access point
> (linksys befw11s4) but it hates me. Well, I suspose it's more along
> the lines of taunting me.
>
> I know it works because I can get to the outside (with difficulty, but
> it's a firewall issue that I'm not going to argue with at the moment)
> on a wireless connection. So I've at least got it partly
> configured....
>
> The problem is that the happy user guide says 'type in
> http://192.168.1.1/ and have configuration goodness'. Well, thereby
> hangs the tail. When booted to linux, it just will *not* see that
> address from a browser. Talking to it by hand via the lowest common
> demoniator broser (telnet) gives similar results. nmap says '80/tcp
> open http'. Ping is happy. iptables are wide open.
>
> In desparation, I went to the dark side... whamo! it worked.
>
> I feel unclean.
>
> If it had been doing NTLM or something I could have said, ok, that's
> the reason, as much as I would dislike it. But even the bloody faq
> says that linux will work to configure it b/c it's a pure web app.
>
> Anybody got a bar of soap (aka clue) to scrub the windows crud offa
> me?
>
> Please?
>
> firmware 1.45.1, June 2003 (newer than released on website afaict).
> http://www.linksys.com/support/support.asp?spid=68#general
>
> Thanks,
>
> David
>     <Faydakin> I'm gonna start using tar for preserving data
>     <Faydakin> just like the dinosaurs

>
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