CaféNet for your iPod
We like CaféNet at the Wellingtonista, yes we do. But it's not always an unqualified feeling. Mostly it works well once you find a hotspot - and more arrive all the time. But sometimes, and with some devices, things aren't so rosy.
At this Wellingtonista's risk of sounding like a spoiled geek whose new toy won't do what it says on the box, it seems that iPods Touch and iPhones don't always have an easy time connecting to CaféNet. And it's not just this writer's experience - others have noticed it too.
More after the jump...
Partly this is the fault of the devices themselves - web pages and help files for connecting Jesus phones and their cut-rate Touch brethren to wi-fi are legion.
Here in Wellington on CaféNet though, the problems are consistent and reproducible, apparently depending on which particular hotspot you attempt to connect to. Most hotspots around town seem to give users via DHCP the same IP address and router (nice piece of behind the scenes magic, that).
A few others seem to be configured differently, and appear only to pass an IP address without a router address, leading to the frustrating situation of the iPhone/iPod Touch being connected the hotspot but being unable even to reach the CaféNet homepage to authenticate.
Having tried to interest the CaféNet helpdesk in this without too much success perhaps the best mitigation for now is to map the problem - contributions welcome. Using this map iPhone/iPod Touch users may be able to find known good hotspots, and avoid the frustration of mis-behaving toys.
[It must also be said that these sorts of problems do not seem to be reported by people using other kinds of wi-fi enabled devices on CaféNet; and for the most part CaféNet works well for iPhone/iPod Touch users.]
Great post Alan -- great idea and an intriguing problem. Not that you necessarily suggest it is so, but it doesn't seem very plausible that the CaféNet DHCP server is supplying half-baked or malformed DHCP infos to the iDevices, especially since other toys have no issues. Keith's info supports this.
Following on from Keith's suggestion, you could even note down the CaféNet DHCP-assigned IP addresses for device, DNS, gateway etc. and then hardcode them into yr machine wen you are in a spot where you can't get good connections; this'd work for a while, until the DHCP lease expired and the server gave it to someone else :)
However, in order for DHCP to work it has to see your announcement on the underlying network; switching to a RL analogy, perhaps the volume, voracity and frequency of the announcement from the iDevices are inadequate?
Thanks for the explanation on the 169.* addresses. The idea of noting the IP addresses was exactly what I had in mind - I've fixed problems on other wi-fi networks in the past by giving the device a plausible (but sufficiently highly numbered to avoid collisions) address.
On CaféNet, depending on how long the DHCP lease lasts for, I could hard-code using a known good set of IP addresses collected initially. CaféNet administrators probably wouldn't recommend that course of action generally though.
The suggestion that it's due to a weak signal would certainly account for some of the problems. But the three yellow pins I've noted so far are right inside the stated hotspots of CaféNet. On the other hand, some other hotspots - such as the Midland Park one - are usable on the iDevice well outside their stated range.
It's all quite interesting.
The IP addresses beginning with 169.* are the addresses OS X self-assigns when it can't get an IP address from a DHCP server. So those yellow pins are symptoms of the iP{hone,od} not being able to find a DHCP server, rather than of a cafenet DHCP server malfunctioning.
In theory, at least, it might be possible to circumvent this by hard-coding an IP address in Cafenet's range and entering the router and DNS, etc. by hand. But since I usually read a 169.* IP as a sign that the signal is too weak to be usable, I've never tried this.