Diagnosing Connection Issues

[vicatcu]

Hey all, I am the proud owner of a WiFi Pineapple Mark V. I haven't had the pleasure of using it very much yet. I have some embedded Wi-Fi hardware (based on a CC3000) that is having trouble connecting to an (open-access) university network. It just hangs on trying to connect and then eventually times out.Could the Wi-Fi Pinapple be useful in helping me get diagnose, or at least gain insight into, why my device is failing to connect? I was thinking it might be able to observe probes and beacons and tell me when/why things are falling apart in the connection. If that's possible, I'd be most appreciative on some guidance / direction as to how to use the fruit to achieve this goal.

[fringes]

Does the university network AP use a captive portal?

[sud0nick]

It probably uses a captive portal. I've used a CC3000 before for a project and I have no problems connecting to my AP at home. Does the university use MAC filtering for its network? Try using your computer's MAC address on the CC3000 if it already has access to the network.

This code assumes you are talking about the Adafruit CC3000 and using the Adafruit_CC3000 library. I assume it should work with other CC3000s but I'm not sure.

uint8_t macAddress[6] = { 0x08, 0x00, 0x28, 0x01, 0x79, 0xB7 };
if (!cc3000.setMacAddress(macAddress))
{
    Serial.println(F("Failed trying to update the MAC address"));
    while(1);
}

Edited June 1, 2015 by sud0nick

[vicatcu]

Does the university network AP use a captive portal?

@fringes, it does - but there's a site that you can go to to register a headless device to bypass the captive portal. You have to authenticate to register a MAC address, at which point it's supposed to just work...

[vicatcu]

It probably uses a captive portal. I've used a CC3000 before for a project and I have no problems connecting to my AP at home. Does the university use MAC filtering for its network? Try using your computer's MAC address on the CC3000 if it already has access to the network.

This code assumes you are talking about the Adafruit CC3000 and using the Adafruit_CC3000 library. I assume it should work with other CC3000s but I'm not sure.

uint8_t macAddress[6] = { 0x08, 0x00, 0x28, 0x01, 0x79, 0xB7 };
if (!cc3000.setMacAddress(macAddress))
{
    Serial.println(F("Failed trying to update the MAC address"));
    while(1);
}

@sud0nick oh that is an interesting thought I had not considered... I'll have to give that a try, thanks for the suggestion. I'm wondering if there's anything I can do in monitor mode and wireshark to observe the 4-way handshake (does that even happen with Open security mode) to figure out what exactly breaking down?