wireless woes :)

[Mike Starke]

Saturday evening we had a power outage; when I awoke (dozed
off in the chair) I realized my wireless connection wasn't
working. SO I hoofed it upstairs, logged onto my OpenBSD AP
and began to dig around. I found nothing. The card appeared
to be working perfectly. So I then focused my attention
to my Debian notebook, and again everything appeared to be
functioning fine. I couldn't find a thing wrong to save my life.
I decided to wait until the morning to figure this out.

The next morning, I did some more digging around, tailing
logs, etc, etc, and found nothing. I was stumped.
I was due for an upgrade on the AP/firewall, so I reloaded
OpenBSD. Copied over my config files, and the same damn
behaviour. The wireless network would work one minute, then
get dog slow the next. I had wondered if the power outage
had toasted one of my cards: The problem was, I didn't
know which one was bad. 

Determined to find out what the problem was, I knew I had
to spend the rest of the day troubleshooting this issue, as
I was determined not to be chained to my desk again.

Something told me to fire up tcpdump. I was amazed at what
I had seen. There was no problem with my cards: My neighbor
had just bought a LinkSys (power outage was just a coincidence:)
wireless ap/router/etc. Once I knew what was happening, and a couple
strange IP's floating around the backyard, I certainly had
enough to keep myself amused for the remainder of the evening :-)
As my OpenBSD installs are bare-bones, I was very thankful
the OpenBSD team included tcpdump & nc.

I don't think I will tell him I know just quite yet :-) We
are good neighbors and I'm tired of watching reruns in the evenings :-)

Moral of my story: Do not asume too much when problems arise.
Power outage or not, your equipment may be just fine.

-Mike