Wireless Connection Problems

[shudrod740]

I have a dell Gx260 pent. 4 1.80ghz , 512mb ram, running 2000 Professional. This is set up on a school domain, and the wireless access point is in the same room has the pc.
I running off a DLink Wireless access point XtremeG model DWL-2100 Ap and the cards in the pc is a DLink AirPlus XtremeG DWL-G520
The problem at first was that no one could log into the domain; "Error: Domain Unavailable". So I checked the wireless card configurations setting and it kept saying disconnected and I tried enabling and disabling; no success. So i tried a another DLink wireless card and took the other one out, uninstalled the software and rebooted and re-installing the wireless software and got it back running; now unfortunately, everytime different users log in the wireless card is not connect to the access point and I have to manually set it to connect. How do I end this nightmare and keep it connected to the access point?

 

[wahnula]

You can't...or at least I couldn't, until I upgraded the PCs to XP. Win2K just isn't meant for auto-configuration of wireless cards, but once you set it up for each user (and each user has an account on the PC) it should retain the settings.

BTW I use the exact same combo of WLAN NIC & WAP, it was a pain.

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[cdogg]

Actually, we used to have quite a few Windows 2000 laptops where I work that relied on wireless. Although the connection was more reliable in the Windows XP environment, users were still able to log into the domain with no issues under 2000.

I suspect the problem is with the D-Link utility, since Windows 2000 relies on 3rd-party tools to manage the wireless connection. The old laptops I was referring to had Cisco Aironet 350 PCMCIA cards (Wireless A/B), so perhaps the Cisco Aironet utility was more efficient. Who knows?

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Einstein
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[wahnula]

cdogg,

I had no connectivity issues either with the D-Link...once the connection was configured for each user. The only problem I would have is that the domain logon would sometimes happen before the card and the utility were ready to go, but connecting to a network share would fix it instantly. I presume the first card was bad.

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[cdogg]

That's interesting that you had to configure the card for each user account. In our environment, the wireless card would connect and stay connected while the laptop was sitting at the CTRL-ALT-DEL prompt. Perhaps the difference with the card or access point in your situation had something to do with it?

 

[wahnula]

What had to be configured was the encryption part of the utility. You know, SSID & key, what type of encryption, etc. This happened every time a user tried to logon from a machine which did not have a user profile set up for them. I finally set up the two shared machines for access by all of the few office-less users, easy to do with limited machines & users. As I mentioned, the hardware was/is identical.

Funny thing was sometimes the wireless network would connect to the domain, then disconnect and notify you that it was not connected.

Upgrading to XP and losing the D-Link utility (using XP's default wireless utility) banished the entire issue, now anyone can login from anywhere, but they won't have a default printer set up or network shares mapped unless they have an account configured.

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[cdogg]

Ahh, I see.

The Cisco Aironet utility we used was able to carry over the settings to all profiles after being configured from an admin profile.
Guess we were just lucky that it did!