Better WiFi solution (802.11b) than USB tethering through a smartphone?

Desperate search, but usenet used to be good for these kinds of topics... L ooks almost dead now. But COBOL still lives!

Situation is that I have an ancient ThinkPad that runs one application that I still use. I think I'm about to break down and port it to a more modern platform, but I'm sort of flexible about things (in my twisted way), so I' m considering alternatives...

Right now, the main hassle is network access. After I run the application, I have to transfer the results to a website. The ThinkPad has an 802.11b ca rd in it, but it has never been able to see external websites properly. (It worked fine on a wired network, but I shut down my home LAN a long time ag o and don't want to set it up again for this trivial purpose.) So the Inter net routing I am currently using is via a retired smartphone. The smartphon e connects to the WiFi on one side and is tethered to the ThinkPad via a US B data cable... It works, but it's a nuisance to set up each time I need it .

So does anyone have an alternative approach so that the 802.11b card can se e the WiFi network? It seems that this was a capability of the standard, bu t I can't even figure that out for sure... Under certain flavors of Linux I 'm able to connect to the WiFi, but never in a way that exchanges data prop erly...

Reply to
shannon.jacobs
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Look on:

formatting link

List your model and check for problems, fixes etc. I believe some Thinkpads has to have a different Intel driver for the onboard Intel wireless.

Reply to
Mr.E

What exact model Thinkpad? Any idea what model card is installed?

I've been substituting Intel 2200BG cards for the old Thinkpads for years. The problem is that the BIOS complains that it's not FCC approved and will not boot. There are work arounds available: I use the "NO-1802" fix.

Incidentally, the only programmer whom I know that is making tons of money only does legacy COBOL programming for financial institutions with huge investments in COBOL hardware and custom software. Talk nicely when you mention COBOL.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

A friend once explained that he was making more money doing COBOL than he could make doing C/C++. I don't think they're training new COBOL programmers, and you're right, banks have huge investments in COBOL code.

Reply to
Jerry Peters

Hit post too soon,

What about an external USB or PCMCIA/CARDBUS wireless adapter?

Reply to
Jerry Peters

It's true, but only for the best programmers. Far too many COBOL jobs essentially temporary. The larger financial institutions have enough COBOL/JCL work to keep a staff of programmers busy. The smaller companies do not. The real problem is that companies that want to convert their legacy COBOL code to something more fashionable, find it difficult to find programmers that know BOTH Ada or whatever, as well was COBOL. Of course the company could write specifications that exactly define their existing COBOL program, but that would probably double their costs and might be difficult to get right. The closest I've seen to that working is one company that bought a COBOL to C converter, ran the conversion, and had a C programmer try to clean up the resultant mess. Amazingly, it came the closest to working of any such effort that I've had the displeasure of watching fail. After a few such disasters, the pathologically conservative financial institutions prefer to maintain their old COBOL code, but on faster and faster runtimes and platforms. For example, COBOL.NET, Visual COBOL, NetCOBOL. Some details: I read somewhere that some have a option to run with known bugs fixed, or to emulate the bugs exactly as in the original COBOL runtime.

There's no count for the number of COBOL programmer jobs available, but offhand, it looks substantial.

Yeah, that's what the pundits and alarmists are claiming: It's true that you won't find college grads with COBOL training or experience. However, you will find plenty of programmers, that after

10-15 years of experience, have accumulated extensive knowledge and experience with all kinds of strange and esoteric languages, which often include COBOL. It's also not unusual for a financial institution to hire an applications programmer, who spends his first 6 months on the job learning the exactly flavor of COBOL used by the financial institution.
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Sure, that will work just fine. Much depends on the Thinkpad. If it's so old that the USB ports are USB 1.1, it's not going to work very well. It should be USB 2.0. There are a few 802.11g PCMCIA cards, but most are Cardbus. USB is generally easier but with Linux, you have to watch out for chips with broken or missing drives. Intel and Atheros are well supported in Linux. The others, not so well.

Now, if you want specific answers, kindly disclose the Thinkpad full model number and exactly mutation of Linux with which you're having problems.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Well, at least this part of usenet isn't as dead as other parts... Glad to see it, even if I accidentally triggered another COBOL defense. All I'm goi ng to contribute to that topic is (1) Money ain't everything, (2) I'm glad I never did COBOL on a professional basis, and (3) Python is fun.

Now on the REAL topic, the ThinkPad in question is an X30. I can get the ex act model and specifics tomorrow, but I'm at a different location today. I' m pretty sure that the USB claims to be 2.0 and the internal WiFi card is a pure 802.11b.

The ThinkWiki website link sounds interesting, though I'm pretty sure I've visited it several times already (among a cloud of other websites).

However, that reminds me to ask about the USB boot procedure... Perhaps I s hould fork it to a new thread, but I think it's related. To experiment with alternative OSes, I've been using a USB stick, but to make that boot work, each time I have to boot to the BIOS, open up the hard disk devices and mo ve the USB stick above the regular hard drive, and then save and reboot. EV ERY time. It says it can save the BIOS settings, but evidently not...

(Separate question about preparing the USB stick, but pretty sure that isn' t relevant. However, so far I've used Lubuntu and some Puppy Linux, though the machine's hard disk is using GRUB with an obsolete Ubuntu as its primar y OS.)

Reply to
shannon.jacobs

In retaliation, I can say that:

  1. I am not a programmist and know little about COBOL.
  2. hardware is more fun than software.
  3. Money isn't everything. It's what you buy everything with.

I have both an X30 and X31 sitting in the closet. Nice small and light machines. However, the case is so flimsy that I have numerous cracks and glued pieces that it looks like it was made by Dr Frankenstein. I would guess(tm) that it's an X31 because I don't think the X30 had an internal wireless card. The X30 has a single USB 1.0 port, which is basically useless. The X31 has two USB 2.0 ports, which should work. I'm not sure on substituting wireless cards in the X31. I'll have to check what's inside mine.

I can assure you that the Thinkwiki web site will not wear out from your susbequent visits and will still be useful when you return. It's not perfect but it's the best that can be found for the older Thinkpad machines.

Check if it saves the date and time. If not, you have a dead battery. There is also a strange zone with an almost dead battery, where it saves only some settings. Think about a replacement.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Yes I know, the company we were working for produced mainframe & AS400 banking software. We were contracted to a very large bank doing IBM assembler programming. I've spent about half of my career working for banks, th other half was in manufacturing with some minor stints in retail & health insurance. I learned COBOL as a college student courtesy of a bank where I had a part-time job in programming. Ended up working for them after graduating with a BSE. Did interesting stuff like online ATM's back in the mid seventies, along with online central files and networking.

Reply to
Jerry Peters

Definitely says X30 right below the display, and my memory is that the inte rnal wireless card was an option. My fuzzy recollection of seeing an X31 is that the X31 did say so, but I haven't seen any similar beasts in many yea rs.

Already found some interesting information there, but the only thread of ho pe appears to be the firmware upgrade. Exploring that now. Unfortunately, t he only candidate appears to be the NIC firmware, which says it's 1.07.04.0

0 on the X30, while the ThinkWiki website says 1.04.09.00 is the latest... More research, but not sure where?

My other hopeful thread was manual network configuration, but that doesn't work. It says it has connected to the network, even though it can't see it, but it uses a 10.* IP address, not the 192.* that I tried to specify. Nor can it see the AP that it seems to think it is connected to, and the AP als o denies seeing the X30 while it is connected in this state.

Slight progress there. It definitely does retain its clock settings, and it even seems to retain the boot order if I reboot directly from the USB stic k. Using Yumi on this pass.

Latest experiments with Lubuntu and Tahr Puppy have all failed, however. :- (

Reply to
shannon.jacobs

Sorry for continuing the OT part of this thread. I set up a small IT business in the early '80's and we desparately needed multi-user/networking in the days of CP/M (Unix was a bit beyond our expertise). CP/Net and RM-Cobol provided a fairly solid platform which extended to MSDOS+Novell then Windows+Novell (but not Windows+Windows Server). The Cobol upgrades were straightforward. Customers were amazed at how much uptime they had compared to some other systems they were running. Sadly the front end would not sell and the system, still running well, went into terminal decline a couple of years back. Young programmers could not cope with the discipline Cobol imposed.

Reply to
AnthonyL

I just found my Thinkpad X30 Type 2672-4XU. It has an internal

802.11b card like this. On the bottom, is sticker with the 802.11b and the wireless card MAC address. It's running Windoze XP and as far as I recall, the wireless card works.
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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