penguinpowered

Now you've got me interested! How do you do that?! 8O

Papercut here. Excellent piece of software - simple, reliable and a breeze to maintain. The support is excellent too, though the company is based in Oz so the time difference can be 'interesting' to get used to. HIGHLY recommended!

i find that even the threat of posting to a forum like edugeek or to a tv show like watchdog will have most companies bending over backward to solve your problem. Most often this is because they don't want one small incident/arrogant staff member to ruin their reputation. Sometimes however it is because they are a lame-dog of a company and they don't want the world to know they are a bunch of scammers and con-artists. Coniston computers sound like they would fall into the first category - a reputable company who made a bit of a mistake and would quite happily rectify if you spoke to the right person. V****N however! Hmmm, what's behind door number 2 again.... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Disclaimer: Views expressed are my own and do not represent the views of MPHS or the LEA.

I finished the first page and then it barfed up a load of errors. I'll try again in a little while.

That isn't particularly accurate because that shows all the packets that windows has sent even ones that haven't reached their destinations. The counter that has recorded all the "sent" packets will be showing all the 'control packets' that have been sent to the AP. Ethereal would be the best way to check what EXACTLY is being sent from the wireless NIC.

Whenever I have problems with a wireless card I just uninstall it completely and then re-install it. Has worked almost EVERY time. We use a range of NICs and APs and haven't had any problems (no serious ones anyway).

KDE is a very robust, feature-packed GUI that comes with a lot of cool apps and was my favourite GUI for about 4 years. Gnome is a very robust, feature-packed GUI that comes with a lot of cool apps and has been my favourite GUI for the the last 18 months. The terminal is a very robust, feature-packed interface with a lot of cool apps and will always be my weapon of choice for 'serious' work. But seriously, I use both and I find that they both have their good points (and bad). KDE is VERY customisable and has lots of cool effects and window-decorations. It doesn't get too bogged down when you are doing CPU, memory and graphically challenging things, and it comes with (and has available) a vast amount of software (it can also use Gnome software). Gnome is very simple but elegant (IMHO) gui that works extremely well (it kinda reminds me of the Mac OS X gui. It has some nicely thought out features and has a wide range of software available that makes use of the nice Gnome-look (it can also use KDE software. I would try both and see which you prefer because at the end of the day that is all that matters. If you decide you don't like KDE or Gnome (or you just fancy a change), then you should also look at fluxbox, xfce, tvwm, enlightenment, etc. There are loads so you should do a google for them and have a look. Happy GUI-fiddling.

I've been waiting for 1.5 since I tried the beta at the start start of november.

An excellent find Geoff. Combined with http://www.wikibooks.org I'll never be stuck for reference material to read again.

I was just thinking the same thing. I think NGfL wouldn't be too chuffed about you running an 'unsecured' second line into the school. Besides, it'll just be cheaper to wait till the remote access trials are done and then set up a Linux box to allow authenticated remote access.

You may as well try it Pear. What I wrote above was my experience of 'fast' wireless from a few months ago. The drivers will probably have been updated, chip firwares upgraded, etc. so your mileage may vary. It's worth giving it a go and if it doesn't work, try ndiswrappers like geoff suggests. If you aren't to comfortable with all the conf files and the command line, I think you can get a gui front end to ndiswrapper (I've seen one on DSL Linux and some flavour of knoppix) however I can't remeber what it is called so you're best googling it. Good luck.

Yeah, but got nowhere with it. Tried using the pre-packaged version, re-compiling from source and every other trick I could scoure from the internet. The best I could do was a netgear card that worked 50% of the time with a speed of about 2mbps average. It occasionally hit around the 50mbps mark but would then segfault and I'd be back at square one with having to go through the whole installation and configuration process again (the card and it's drivers would NEVER recover from a crash without me cleaning out all the files and starting again). Eventually I gave up and got a nice 11mbps re-branded orinoco and I've been happy ever since. Maybe it's time I should revisit this little nightmare of mine and see if the drivers (and my C++ knowledge) are any better nowadays.

I have had nothing but trouble with all 3 of those brands in Linux. Ndiswrapper has give me nothing but headaches in the past. When you finally get it working correctly it is quite flaky and very unreliable and the speeds you get are quite poor. Try getting one based on either the orinoco/hermes chipset or a prism 2 chipset. I use an enterasys 801.11b pcmcia (orinoco gold) card and that works great in my laptop. I also used to use a 11mbps prism2 based card in my pc. The only cards (that I know of) that work relliably (or at all) on linux boxes are orinoco/hermes and prism/prism2 based cards. I think that the 11mbps cisco ones work too. But don't use any prismgt based cards (all the ones you named above) as they are flaky at best and most of the time don't work. Incidentally, I haven't got a card that is faster than 11mbps to work with linux yet (I stopped trying about 8 months ago). Presumably it is because the vast majority of 54mbps cards use the prismgt chipset.

Also, try different network cables (in case the one thats being used is damaged). A cable with just one damaged wire can sometimes get limited connectivity and behave very oddly in my experience.

What data can it send? What data can't it receive? Can you ping other workstations/servers from it? Can it be pinged from other workstations/servers? Has it been assigned a correct IP address (using dhcp or statically)? Have you tried using IP addresses as well as host names (may be a problem with DNS)? I've had similar problems in the past and I find that once I've checked all of the above I have usually found the break in the chain somewhere.