Connectify set up problems.

[tonygamble]

I am working with a relatively old Asus S5n laptop. It came with XP installed.

Having managed to get an ad-hoc connection to work under XP I decided to explore the Connectify route. That requires Win 7 so I bought the upgrade.

Connectify cannot work on the Intel 2200BG wifi chip so I bought a USB wifi device as below:-

http://www.lindy.co.uk/wireless-lan-usb ... 52014.html

Initially I was able to create a WPA2 hotspot with Connectify and I did get it to register on the card. But I could not get images to download.

Hyachts suggested “Another thing to try would be to turn off (disable) your internal wireless card and only use the USB stick, both for the access point and for your internet connection. Having multiple network adapters configured may be making it difficult for the Helper to find the right adapter to listen on.”

I did this and I have disconnected the internal wifi in the laptop and am now running entirely with the USB wifi stick.

I am one step further back as I decided to create a new WPA2 profile in Connectify.

Although it seems to create the new hotspot I cannot get my Pro X2 card to accept it.

In the manager I can see the new profile and I can add the WPA2 password.

Then I get:-

Connecting to the Wireless Network followed by
Waiting for a Network Address.

Then I get the DHCP timeout message - or once in a while the Card is Idle message.

Any clues, please?

Tony

[tonygamble]

OK, Patience seems to have had its rewards. I have got a Connectify Access Point link working and it downloads images.

I did re-install Connectify, but I am not sure whether that was partly the problem.

I turned off my internal wifi as recommended but only when I turned it back on and used that to provide a link to the internet did I get my final configuration to be accepted by the Eye-Fi card.

As posted above I had DHCP errors. I also noticed that I was, today anyway, getting messages that the Helper was trying to contact the Eye-Fi web site. That made me wonder whether a link back to Eye-Fi was essential to getting a profile accepted on the card. When I was trying to get Ad-hoc to work I only seemed to get it to lock into the card when I was hard wired into the internet.

I realised that now I had two wifi links I could use the internal one to connect to the internet and I use the external USB one for wifi to the card. Using that set up I created a Connectify Access Point profile that the card accepted.

With the card in the camera, a Panasonic G1, I can take pix and they download to the laptop.

I have yet to work out how long it takes for the first image to go to the PC - maybe ten to fifteen seconds?

After that they go down with four or five seconds delay. I am transmitting RAW's and they take two to three seconds a file.

My jury is out as to whether this is much of an advantage on ad-hoc. It certainly was harder to set up, partly as the need to use Connectify and an external USB wifi stick in my case.

But at least it works.....

As does my original ad-hoc. So I have now two routes (as long as I can remember which wifi to turn on and off !!!)

Tony

[tonygamble]

I'm bumping this old thread as it refers to DHCP errors when I tried to register the newly created network on the card.

I was convinced that this was because I needed to be on the internet to do it. Some overnight posts highlighted this remark.

"If you select "Other network..." from the pull-down to select networks in the "Settings" dialog, you are presented with the text box to enter the name of the network, as well as a checkbox to designate whether or not you are within range of the network. As you can see from the upper-right corner of the following screenshot, these are all available when you are offline and not connected to the Internet."

This is the reason for my errors. Doing what the above suggests makes the registering easy and quick.

I am sure a lot of the problems that people are having with getting their new cards to recognise an ad-hoc or Connectify access point are due to their ignorance that these options are there - but not all that easy to spot.

Tony

[berend]

I'm bumping this old thread as it refers to DHCP errors when I tried to register the newly created network on the card... I am sure a lot of the problems that people are having with getting their new cards to recognise an ad-hoc or Connectify access point are due to their ignorance that these options are there.

Tony,

To be fair, I would expect any DHCP issues encountered during adding the profile to persist when connecting to an ad hoc network for transferring the media, too, so while selecting "Other network..." and setting the checkbox to indicate that the network is "out of range" will avoid DHCP (or link-level IP address assignment) problems when setting up the profile, I'm not sure if it would be a real solution.

When adding a true ad hoc network, the Eye-Fi Card has the smarts to not do the final step of end to end network connectivity verification ("Contacting the Eye-Fi server..."), but it does expect to at least succeed in getting an address via DHCP or discovering its peer with link-level IP address assignment.

If, however, a "software AP" solution is used to create an infrastructure network for "peer to peer" use and there is no broadband connectivity offered by the computer, then I can see how choosing "out of range" would help to avoid doing the end-to-end connectivity verification, but those would be cases where the IP address negotiation via DHCP is working and it is only the last step of the network profile addition process that's failing ("Contacting the Eye-Fi server...").

Given that Connectify, to the best of my understanding, uses Windows 7's software AP features (and therefore deploys an infrastructure network), I would expect any issues related to it to fall into the latter category, but I wanted to clarify that it should not be DHCP issues that are addressed by this approach and, that the issues are somewhat different between the ad hoc and Connectify cases.

Thank you for taking the time for your helpful post,

Berend

[tonygamble]

Goodness knows how I got my Connectify based connection to work.

For reasons I cannot remember I decided to recreate it and have never succeeded.

Considering I have had to disable the internal wifi, attach a USB wifi stick and also keep seeing references to a miniport wifi adaptor being problematic I reckon I am pushing the technology too far.

I'm now resorting to ad-hoc - but if anyone has any further ideas on Connectify I will read them with relish.

Tony