I have been trying to trouble shoot my linux wireless internet
setup. It works most of the time, but sometimes it does not.
I use wicd as the program to control my verizon samsung device
that gives me internet access.

At times wicd does not find the network signal from the samsung,
yet if I reboot and use windows, windows can find it and
operate, so I am pretty sure that the verizon network is up
and working, when this happens.

So I decided to educate myself on wireless networks, and found
an internet site that tries to give an explanation of how
wireless networks work.
http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/w...ess_Networking
Here is one of the first explanations it gives:

Here is what I don't understand in the above:
(1) what is a central hub? Is this the samsung device in
my system? It seems like it could be because it can be
the cental point to communicate with 4 different local
computers. On the other hand, maybe verizon is the
central hub, that communicates with all those samsung
things out there. It seems to be a pretty central thing
in the system also.

(2) What is a wireless server? In this section of my
explanation it refers to the wireless server.
So what is this wireless server? My guess is that it is
a server on verizon that serves things out to the various
customers, but I suppose it could be the individual
computers in the typical home network being serviced
by the samsung thing in my system if the WAP is my
samsung device.

(3) In this section servers are referred to again:
Again it looks like server refers to each computer
in the network, because it also speaks of each one's
NIC. Yet this does not seem right to me, because
I have always thought of a server as some device which
existed to give some specific service to a bunch of
other things like a network server, existed to
give a central storage and access of files to the
other computers in the network.


So I have to understand these points in order to
understand what a WAP is. I have the vague guess
that the WAP is my samsung device, but with that
explanation given above, I have no conviction
whatever that this is true.


On the other hand, maybe someone can recommend something
that explains wireless networks in more simple terms,
that I can understand.

Hi there,

I will try to keep the explanation simple. So here we go:

1. WAP: Wireless Access Point is called central hub because every device which has got Wi-Fi will get into the network using this device. So you can consider this WAP device as default gateway (like we have in networking) for all Wi-Fi devices which are trying to communicate. For example you have got a ADSL connection at home and you have connected it to your desktop but you also want to connect your laptop to internet using this ADSL connection so what you will do is you will buy a Wireless router to which you will connect your desktop and laptop. You desktop will be directly connected to this router using wired connection however your laptop will connect to this router using Wi-Fi. So for your laptop this router will act as WAP.

2. All devices/servers which communicate to each other using WAP are considered to be wireless servers/devices. Please let me know if more explanation is required on this.

3. Server can communicate to each other using WiFi (without WAP) if their NICs are configured in Ad Hoc mode. Simple example of this will be your phone. You connect your phone to someone else phone using bluetooth to share data. In this way servers NIC will act as bluetooth device and will get detected by each other to transfer data. However, these servers will only be able to communicate with each other or any other device configured in the same way within the specified range. They will not be able to get onto the internet/network without WAP.

I hope this helps.

Let me know if you require more explanation on particular point.

You're reading too much into the words and taking them to be formal, real things. there is no such thing as a "Central Hub", it's just the author using a simple description. Just imagine that the wireless network is wired instead and all cables are plugged into a switch. so all data goes through the switch as a logical "hub" just like many airports are "hubs" as are postal sorting offices. So like there is no cable directly between every single wired machine, the wireless signals are not directly between machines.

2) a wireless server... again, just a term. like if you are running apache on one wireless laptop, you access that server by sending a wireless signal to the AP from your laptop, and then it sends it out to the other laptop.

just forget the term "WAP" and put in "router" "Wireless boxy thing" or whatever you personally call the box that Verizon sent you.

Thanks for the help. I will see how it goes now with this imput.