Skynet Global compatibility?

[Greg Lehey]

On Wednesday, 14 November 2001 at 17:52:02 +1100, Brad Hards wrote:
> Brad Hards wrote:
>>
>> I picked up a brochure for a company offering wireless access in some areas
>> (http://www.skynetglobal.com), and it looked kind of interesting (range of
>> plans, probably 22c/min).

I've not looked recently.  I'm paying $20 a month, which might be a
little high compared to 22c a minute.  They now have a system where
you can hire a card at the Qantas club reception.  I don't know how
much it costs, but there's an obvious way to find out.

>> Has anyone played with this with Linux (specifically, with a 2.4
>> kernel, and the orinoco driver for a Prism II type card)?

I use an Orinoco card with FreeBSD, and I haven't had any problems
with the link.

>> Also, does anyone know how the authentication works?
>
> I was in the Qantas Club in Sydney yesterday, and gave it a quick try.
>
> Set the essid to "skynetglobal" - eventually it "took" after some card
> mangling.

JOOI, how did you find out the ESSID?  For the sake of completeness, I
suppose you used DHCP to get an IP address.

> ping -b 255.255.255.255 produced a few (6?) responses, all in the
> 10.something.something.X range.

These are probably other systems installed locally.  I've never seen
any other customer activity in a Qantas club lounge, though I have in
the USA (once).

> ping www.google.com produced a typical response. times looked ok,
> but I didn't record them.

Hmm.  This didn't use to work until you authenticated.

> finally bringing up netscape dropped me into a https:// cgi script, looking
> for a password and username, which I ignored.  Couldn't get to google or my
> pop-server.
>
> ncftp couldn't get to mirror.aarnet.edu.au
>
> got called for my flight.
>
> Conclusion: some kind of proxying setup requiring authentication. icmp and dns
> work. the pop-server might not be available from outside the telstra adsl
> service - I've never tried it from externally before.

I missed the original message.

I've been subscribed to SkyNet Global's service since March.  They're
gradually getting their act together (last week they finally got
reverse DNS on their mail server!), and it's beginning to look pretty
reasonable.

What you say there is pretty much correct.  The authentication is
necessary to get routed at all, so you won't get anywhere otherwise.

On the whole, I think the service isn't too bad.  Sending mail is
still an issue: if the server doesn't have reverse DNS, a number of
sites (including my own and also FreeBSD.org) refuse to accept the
mail.  The NAT gateway address (still) doesn't have reverse DNS, so
you can't send mail directly.  When the mail server external interface
also didn't have reverse DNS, this was a good way to lose mail and
never find out about it.  I'm fairly confident that they're improving
things now, though.

Greg
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