And now for something new and different.....

Tinkering with different distros on my laptop, I found some situations where I could not connect to my office wi-fi. I think I have finally traced it to their use of "$$" as part of the ESSID. On the home network, I can duplicate the problem by putting "$$" into the ESSID on the router, and then re-configuring the laptop.

(I did find one application which was OK with $$ in the ESSID--I now need to backtrack to see which one it was.....perhaps I should learn to keep notes.....)

Does anyone know of some common denominator in the lower-level SW that would account for this behavior? And any way to fix it?

The probability of my organization changing the wireless ID to accommodate a few Linux users: ~0.01%

For the most part in Networking going back many years no matter of the type OS it is best to use standard characters a-z, 0-9 for naming. Makes life easier when crossing platforms.

Brian

Cool, now its you and I against my IT dept. (I still think we're going to lose....)

I found one app that doesn't care about the $$---Gnome NetworkManager on Fedora. Curiously, Gnome on Ubuntu doesn't work. (I did not check if it was also NetworkManager.)

PS--partially off-topic.
Assuming that it works in the office, this makes Fedora the ONLY distro which has Wireless and Power management working out of the box. Anyone know the secret?

Better gui tools? I always thought that behind the scenes everything was using iwconfig .


Can you put the ssid in quotes and have it work? Or if you try to run it through wpa_supplicant maybe?

<edit>
Actually now that the coffee is kicking in, I bet you need to escape the $ character. Since $ means something in most shells, that is probably where the difficulty is happening. So I'm guessing quotes or \ might do the trick.
</edit>

Hangdog---you are a flipping genius!!! I am forever in your debt.

I had tried single and double quotes to no avail. However "\$\$" works! A quirk is that the application (wi-fi radar, in this case) auto-detects the broadcast (ESSID = herring$$), If I try to configure that and change the ESSID, it won't let me. I have to create a new profile with ESSID = herring\$\$.

I cannot wait to get to the office to see that it works there.....

Now to understand more about suspend when the lid is closed.....

Hey, it was the coffee talking......

Now that you've figured it out, I wonder if this isn't one of those little tricks people can use to make it really difficult to associate with a AP. Of course I bet Windows doesn't have a problem since it isn't going through shell commands.