I'm at the conference, and the hotel has wireless everywhere, both rooms and conference rooms. Unfortunately, I don't seem to be able to connect to it with my D-Link card. It shows up when I do a site survey, but it won't connect. When I borrowed an SMC card from the front desk and installed it, it connects, but I don't get name resolution. I can ping known IPs on the internet, but it doesn't know what (for example) "yahoo.com" is.

I'm typing this on a machine in the hotel business center, hoping that someone might have an idea what the problem might be.

As far as the conference goes, it's largely the usual suspects so far, and nothing new, at least not in the presentations. More tomorrow, perhaps.

[Friday morning update]

I'm blogging live from the conference now. Michael Mealing figured out that the hotel's DNS service is confused in such a way that XP, which is more forgiving of such things, didn't mind, but various flavors of Unix and W2K do. He managed to find the right numbers via a DNS query, I hardwired them into my network connection, and all is right with the world again. Posts will appear as events warrant.

Rand,
I too had some problems with the Wifi at the conference.

For some reson their DNS servers do not answer pings,but the DNS works just the same?
I had to try loading google three times, after the third try everything just worked???

The Tech support number for the hotel WiFi is
availible at the front desk.

Paul

In your TCP/IP properties, click on the advanced button, then select the DNS tab. The DNS server addresses in order used field should be blank. You probably have append primary and connection specific DNS's selected maybe try switching to append DNS suffixes in order and input the Domain suffix name of the ISP for the hotel. Also, make sure there is a check mark next to Register this connection's address in DNS. With DNS many times it's no one specific setting that can get things working properly. It is just a matter of going through and flipping options on and off again and eventually clearing out the setting that is causing your conflict.

Also, there is a command line utility at the command prompt called ipconfig. Try to use the ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew command in that order to refresh your ip address for your wireless adapter. Another good one to try is the ipconfig /flushdns command to see if that helps.

In your wireless adapter properties make sure you are set to infrastructure only, stay away from any adhoc networks. Where you see the adapter is trying to connect automatically to a SSID then try to take that SSID and manually add it to your preferred networks sections. Should use open authentication and depending on the network you are in they probably don't use WEP or supply a key automatically. Don't use any kind of IEEE smart card authentication, just disable it.

With your dlink card I hope your using the Dlink client utility that came with your wireless adapter? I have a number of dlink wireless adapters and none of them work very will when Windows is allowed to contol the wireless connection. Just use the software interface provided with the card.

Otherwise, yes the hotel support is your best bet. Its extremely difficult to troubleshoot through a comments section of a blog.

Yes the hotel support is your best bet. Its extremely difficult to troubleshoot through a comments section of a blog.