Wireless Pre Logon

[Quackers]

We have some old X Staff laptops, Acer Travelmate 250's, about 4.5 years old with AMBIT Mini PCI Wireless cards in them.

 

Nothing wrong with them except batterys are dead really, so i thought i'd try and get them working as a odd few laptops for students, but they need to be plugged in when used, which is feasable.

 

Problem is they will not initialise the wireless card pre logon! We've got 100's of laptops on trollys, but these will not work in the same way for some reason.

 

I've got the "Always wait for network at startup" selected, and i'm using the Wireless Zero Configuration Service.

 

Its only when you logon do you see it try and grab an IP Address.

 

What can i do?

[bmdixon]

Are you using Active Directory? If so, you may need to set something on each laptop to allow it to use the dial-in "Remote Access Permission".

 

Go to the properties in AD for one of the laptops that won't work and go to the Dial-in tab. Make sure that the "Remote Access Permission" is set to Allow and you should be ok

[spc-rocket]

We have some old X Staff laptops, Acer Travelmate 250's, about 4.5 years old with AMBIT Mini PCI Wireless cards in them.

 

Nothing wrong with them except batterys are dead really, so i thought i'd try and get them working as a odd few laptops for students, but they need to be plugged in when used, which is feasable.

 

Problem is they will not initialise the wireless card pre logon! We've got 100's of laptops on trollys, but these will not work in the same way for some reason.

 

I've got the "Always wait for network at startup" selected, and i'm using the Wireless Zero Configuration Service.

 

Its only when you logon do you see it try and grab an IP Address.

 

What can i do?

 

Check the usual,

 

=> Updated drivers on the wireless card

=> Up to date firmware on the access/point wireless lan controller

 

Ash.

[ICTNUT]

I think we need a little more info here:

 

When you say wireless pre logon what are you trying to do?

 

What authentication methods are you using?

 

What kind of wireless setup do you have? WEP, WPA, RADIUS, 802.1x?

 

I have a very complex managed wireless network based on WPA2+TKIP+RADIUS+802.1x with Machine Authentication and Client Autentication where machine authentication happens when the client is sat at the logon screen without anyone being logged on this is classed as wireless pre logon.

[Quackers]

I think we need a little more info here:

 

When you say wireless pre logon what are you trying to do?

 

What authentication methods are you using?

 

What kind of wireless setup do you have? WEP, WPA, RADIUS, 802.1x?

 

I have a very complex managed wireless network based on WPA2+TKIP+RADIUS+802.1x with Machine Authentication and Client Autentication where machine authentication happens when the client is sat at the logon screen without anyone being logged on this is classed as wireless pre logon.

 

By Pre-Logon i mean being able to logon to a domain, have Wireless connected at the logon screen.

 

Its just WEP here (have a lot of very early Intergrated Wireless cards here, that do not support TKIP, WPA etc, just WEP, as i found out when i tried to set it up using 4 years ago using RADIUS). Infact its these same bastard cards that will not pre logon with wireless

[ricki]

Hi

 

I used to have this problem with a make of laptop.

 

What I had to do was remove the vendors wifi package and then just installed the driver and not the wifi controlling software. To get the wifi to work before logon you have to use the windows util.

 

I hope this works.

 

Richard

[m25man]

I came across this very early on in the wireless revolution with the Acer's.

The company I worked for at the time sold a load of them.

 

It was all down to the soft switches on the Acers, until the drivers for the switches along the top of the keyboard were loaded in Windows it was not possible to power on the Wifi!

Abosolutely Brilliant!

 

I would first check the Acer Archives for a BIOS update, you might be in luck.

Make sure the manufacturers hotkey drivers are loaded and are included in your base image if cloning.

[plexer]

Remove pin 13 and make the wireless always on then?

 

Ben

[Quackers]

I came across this very early on in the wireless revolution with the Acer's.

The company I worked for at the time sold a load of them.

 

It was all down to the soft switches on the Acers, until the drivers for the switches along the top of the keyboard were loaded in Windows it was not possible to power on the Wifi!

Abosolutely Brilliant!

 

I would first check the Acer Archives for a BIOS update, you might be in luck.

Make sure the manufacturers hotkey drivers are loaded and are included in your base image if cloning.

 

Thanks, that has cured it!