Help! Phantom WLAN needs assistance!

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Well, I'm stuck downtown. Went to activate WEP (yeah, I know) on an AP used in a small office and I can't even get on the AP. It's a Linksys. I got the username/password from the guy I contract with but they didn't know what IP they set it to. I figured it was the x.x.x.1 since I can ping it but it's not associated with any network node. Can't open that IP up via a web browser. I brought my linksys AP setup disk from home hoping it would get me in but it doesn't even detect an AP on the network (but I'm using it right now to connect to everything else!).

I downloaded netstumbler and ethereal to see if I could get anything. Even though I've configured my laptop to the same SSID and IP address scheme as the rest of the network and even though I can ping the other nodes, when I open up netstumbler, there's nothing. I tried it at home and I detected my own WLAN. I tried capturing packets (I'm hoping to find the AP's IP address in case I guessed wrong) but I get no traffic at all, even when I ping the other nodes on the network and use one network computer to access shares on another.

What is this...the phantom network? The only thing I did achieve was discovering that most of the computers had a variety of workgroup/ssid names that were different from each other. I corrected that and improved network connectivity but I can't find let alone get into the AP's controls. I'm getting pretty frustrated here!

 

I checked....no wep on my machine. I can't check the AP to see what's going on there. If it has wep enabled but nobody else does, how the heck could we associate with it? The search goes on. Thanks.

 

Looks like I'll just be hitting the reset button, putting back to its factory defaults and (hopefully) setting it up all over again. I have an e-mail in to Linksys but I'm pretty sure that's what they'll say.

That WLAN was set up screwy. Not all the wireless notes were set up for the same SSID so I had to go in and fix every computer, wireless or not, to have the same workgroup name. One laptop only gets intermittant signals and I suspect that the port replicator is blocking the antenna. May have to recommend a USB external unit. We'll see.