Wireless Update

We’re at the end of day two of the new wireless network. First up, I want to thank all our users for being so understanding as we work through the kinks that weren’t able to be found in our initial testing. Seriously, you are a fantastic bunch of users to work for, and we appreciate it immensely!We’re identifying and fixing problems as they appear. The issues we’re aware of and working on are these:

• Some users are experiencing wireless hangs or drops. This seems to happen regardless of whether the user is connected to a VPN client or not. This is our top priority, and we’re working on it.
• Parallels users who use Bridged networking mode (the default) will find their virtual machines cannot use the network. A separate announcement with a work-around will be posted to the Mac section of the Systems Blog, as well as mailed to mac-users mailing list and added to the Mac OS pages. The short version of the solution is to download and install the latest Parallels RC2, and enable Shared networking.
• The network registration page seems to remain cached in your browsers. We’re working on this problem as well. In the meantime, follow these steps:

Internet Explorer

• either: Hold the Control key, and press F5.
• or: Hold the Control key, and click the Refresh button on the toolbar.

Mozilla, Netscape and Firefox

• either: Hold down the Control and Shift keys, and press R. On an Apple Mac, use the Command key instead of Control.
• or: Hold down the Shift key, and click the Reload button on the navigation toolbar.

Up until earlier this afternoon, Bonjour/Rendezvous networking was broken. This should now be fixed.Let’s take a look at registration and static IP addresses. The network registration page on the MCS FAQ page no longer contains a way to register for a permanent wireless address. This is by design – most of the reasons a person would need to have a statically assigned wireless address are removed. For example, you only need to register a single time rather than weekly as it was under the old system. Also, even though your address may change from time to time, if you specified you required access to an external mail server, you’ll always get an address capable of doing that. Old static addresses would get .mcs.anl.gov addresses, but we’re not actually allowed to do that anymore; we’re trying our best to deal with the issues that brings up.However, we realize that we can’t think of all the reasons you might need a static address. If you feel you need one, please send a note to [email protected], and let us know how many and the reason for them. We ask for the reason so we can catalog them, allowing us to know when, instead of having a handful of exceptions, we should transform it into a new or changed rule.One reason we’ve found that people would like to have a static address is to be able to access internal websites. Because the wireless network is a visitor network, we’re not allowed to open up direct access. But we have a workaround. If you configure your browser to use an autoconfiguration URL for its proxy, you will automatically use our proxy when on our wireless network, but not when you’re elsewhere.Instructions on how to do this are in the MCS Wireless FAQ. If you’re comfortable configuring your own browser, the autoconfiguration URL is http://www.mcs.anl.gov/proxy/proxy.pac.Please continue to report any issues that you don’t see covered above, and we’ll continue to plug away at it.