Tang's DW

A little while ago I took my laptop to Starbucks and used their wireless. Everything worked as expected.

A littler while ago I took my laptop to Starbucks and it refused to connect to their wireless. Other customers were connected, so the network was up. "Restarting the network" (whatever that does) through KDE, multiple times, made no difference. wlan0 had the correct ssid. status: no carrier. messages log contains:

wlan0: Trying to associate with 9c:1c:12:17:6f:d0 (SSID='Google Starbucks' freq=2412 MHz)
wlan0: Authentication with 9c:1c:12:17:6f:d0 timed out.
wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED bssid=9c:1c:12:17:6f:d0 reason=3 locally_generated=1

The "authentication timed out" message is curious because this particular starbucks has an open access point with no security and no authentication beyond asking you to take a cookie after you have connected.

According to a list of reason codes, reason=3 is DISASSOCIATION_REASON_CODE_STATION_LEAVING_ESS - Deauthenticated because sending station has left or is leaving IBSS or ESS. "Extended Service Set" is another name for a wireless network. "Independent Basic Service Set" is another name for a wireless access point. All this message means is that my laptop disconnected, likely whenever I tried to reconnect or when the authentication failed.

A related aggravation: selecting the starbucks network from the network systray icon caused KDE to delete the configuration for my home network, so I had to type it in again when I got hope.