So a couple days ago I blogged about my recent experience with Ubuntu Linux and some of the issues and successes I’ve had. Well, one of the big issues I’m still having is in regards to getting my wireless card to connect to a DHCP enabled access point. I’ve been tinkering with this for countless hours over the last week and it turns out I’ve been tinkering in the entirely wrong place (silly me).

Apparently, it seems that this isn’t so much a Linux/Intel 2200BG issue as it is a “cheap-pile-of-crap-Qwest-provided-Actiontec access point” issue. I guess this particular access point has some weird DNS issues when you connect with a Linux based machine with DHCP enabled. Although you may be able to connect to the access point and ping pretty much any site on the entire interweb (I can both connect and ping), you will still get intermittant “failure to resolve hostname” errors when trying to surf. Apparently this issue has been going on for well more than a year now and Actiontec/Qwest are pretty much ignoring it. I suppose this is just one of those things you have to get used to when using a non-Windows OS.

So now that I know what the problem is, I’ve found a semi-solution for this issue by settings a static IP and gateway id within the Ubuntu Network manager. This isn’t really as big a deal as you might think as Ubuntu doesn’t have a Windows style “browse for available networks” tool so you kind of have to know the info about any access point you plan to connect to anyway. But if you’d rather leave DHCP enabled, here’s another set of possible work arounds. Just thought I’d share my newfound knowledge of this stupid issue.