Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1

I swear I'll get back to blogging about low level network communication someday... today is not that day.

I just had to wrestle with my tablet, a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 to connect to a 5Ghz wifi AP. I found the problem, even after googling, people seem to just give up... hopefully people having trouble, will find this. (for those looking for help, scroll down to the marker and start reading, a little backstory follows)

I have a pretty complicated network, as you might imagine; being that my wifi is mainly shared, I actually setup an Access Point that will automatically choose the "least congested" channel, so that my android devices can connect to it.  Mainly my phone, since it will only connect to 2.4Ghz wireless. I do however, have 5Ghz routers, and one is on the network, and it's the only 5Ghz in my neighborhood (that I've ever detected).  This is good because there's typically so many 2.4 Ghz networks that congestion will stop you from having a nice, clear, quality signal; as I've stated in previous posts, this will slow down your network communication to a crawl.

Well, that's exactly what happened for me today, I have one AP at 2.4Ghz auto-select "least congested" JUST FOR ME, and a household, shared AP, also 2.4Ghz, that I tend to avoid; primarily so that the bandwidth there can be used by others in the house, and I don't have to fight with their devices... in terms of contention. so there's that.  But today, while using my tablet, I found that I was on the household AP, and trying to watch youtube clips was insanely slow (5+ mins of buffering for a 2 minute video).  I said enough is enough, and went to check my network status; once I found I was on the household wifi I thought to myself "that must be why" and promptly switched to my "least congested" access point.  To my disappointment, this yielded zero improvement. Without going through the motions of reassigning the wifi channels to all my devices to see if I can find something a little less congested (a very difficult feat in this environment); I decided to jump-ship and onto the 5Ghz. I set my tablet to only connect to 5Ghz networks.... voila. wait what? no networks? how is this right?

I logged into my 5Ghz AP and started tinkering.

---- FIX FOLLOWS (for those skipping my little story time) ----

After a little effort, I changed the settings to be more compatible, and the network popped up almost immediately.  My current 5Ghz settings (that are working with my Tab): I selected a low-numbered channel, the second lowest, 36 I believe, changed the channel width to 20Mhz, and saved.

That's it. pretty much just pick a channel in the first dozen or so.

network popped up quickly, I connected and all my wifi woes went away.

Happy networking folks!

Broadcom!

What an aggrivation.

I've spent the last day and a half trying to get Broadcom Advanced Control Suite to team four links together, turns out, the issue may be my OS.

Some time ago, for reasons only known to broadcom, they decided to disable teaming functions on all SBS servers.  I'm quite baffled as to why.

Turns out that when BACS installer detects SBS, it disabled the option to install Broadcom Advanced Server Program; this BASP program is used to create the virtual interface for a team, that dictates the IP settings across the entire team.

So, anybody have a hacked BACS install that overrides the check for SBS?