Ipod won't connect to home network
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I'm not at all familiar with this pfsense thing, I'm 16 and almost two months ago, my father died. He was always tinkering with the network and changing things, and it always seemed complicated and tedious to me how he always needed to change things and make them so complicated. He made this really over the top seeming setup in his closet with the router and an absurd antenna that he uses for the wireless network as opposed to a wireless router. Whatever it is he's done with the wireless network it's made it so you need to manually setup any device beyond just knowing the password. Never using the wireless network much at all myself, this was never a big problem to me, but today is my brothers birthday and he's just started college so he's getting out of the house more so my mom bought him an ipod touch but I can't get it to connect to the network. It can find the network (ubnt) but it doesn't recognize it until you put in the ip address and the subnet mask, but even then it wont connect and it wont prompt me to put in the password. So what I need is for someone to help me that knows how it all might work, I think it requires you to input a device on the pfsense site but I don't know how to do that either, and I don't know what to put in for the "router" section on the ipod either, I think I have the dns right. If anyone could help me help my brother I would really very much appreciate it.
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I suppose I should add that my other brothers ipod also stopped being able to connect to the network some time ago, along with the crappy tablet I never used, so I'm pretty sure that it's something my dad changed that made this happen.(edit)
the router is using this thing called a bullet antenna as the wireless point, the ipod recognizes the network after I manually input all of the ip and everything but it refuses to actually connect.It says the network I've selected is not offering an internet connection
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Sounds like your Dad was a bit of a hacker, something to be proud of!
You cant find the SSID (wifi broadcast name) which is what shows up when looking for wireless connections, its not needed to connect to wifi though, if you fancy taking a look at things like Air Crack NG http://www.aircrack-ng.org/, you might also find this useful http://www.windowsnetworking.com/kbase/WindowsTips/Windows7/UserTips/Miscellaneous/DiscoveraHiddenWirelessNetworksSSIDNetworkName.html the techniques will be similar across all the different computer OS's and Google is useful provided you use the right keywords to look up what you are looking for.
It seems based on what you have said, the wifi access might be limited to MAC ID's and the IP address being used, in other words the MAC ID of the device needs to have the right ip address before it can work on the wifi.
Each network interface will have a MAC ID, http://www.macvendorlookup.com/
the MAC identifies the make and model of the network card, beit a wifi, bluetooth or cabled network interface device, which then makes it possible to direct specific zero day exploits to the relevant network interface if you are interested in hacking and computer security.Anyway, firstly I'd backup the pfsense firewall, have a look at the XML backup file in a text editor and look over it to get a feel for how pfsense stores data and where you might find them in the interface. If you mess anything up, at least you can restore the backup file to get working again but also make sure you know how to restore the backups from the command line assuming you have keyboard access to the pfsense firewall. Depending on the version of pfsense you are using version 2.2.x has an option now so its quite easy, but check what version you are using and making sure you can restore a backup in a worst case scenerio before making any changes.
These links might help. https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Full_BackupThis is for an earlier version of pfsense as its posts from 2008 https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=7689.0
This XML backup will be of use for looking up the IP address assigned to a MAC id as you might/should see MAC ID's and the corresponding ip device in the XML file https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/DHCP_Server
The Static IP is the same as a Fixed IP, in case your terminology is different to the docs, understanding the terminology is half the problem in anything, considering some people call a Firewall a Sensor in different contexts and scenerios, medicine & law likes to use Latin, and so on.
See how go and if you dont know, just ask assuming you can get online, so might also be worth making sure you have a different method to get online perhaps using a smartphone although bear in mind it will be tedious and slow typing out lots of words onto the forums.
I'm sure others will chip in if you get stuck who can also contribute so have fun!
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Thank you so much for your input, I found something called "daypassers" in the firewall section that had a few different ips listed, after trying a couple I managed to get it to accept the connection, but it wouldn't actually connect to the internet from the router. Then in a moment of stubbornness I did one again and it went through. I'm just going to accept that I have no idea how it worked but it was a good learning experience for if I ever get a smartphone in the future. Although it still terrifies me thinking of the possibility that my entire internet will go down one day and I'll have no idea how to fix it. Maybe I'll end up learning how all this works at some point, my dad always liked to have me watch him put things together, thanks again.
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Maybe Daypassers is a reference to a time schedule that allows access to the internet based on time of day, ie killing net access off at night to stop all night online gaming sessions.
It might be easier if you setup your own pfsense box from scratch for net access, still keep your dads setup to learn from if you want to learn from it, but at least you have your own firewall setup which you can setup and learn from whilst making net access easier or less of a hassle when you have mates round who want some net access for their devices as one possibility.
One of the main risks with swapping out your dads pfsense setup with your own, is if you have missed anything that stops one or more of your other devices from working that needs net access.
If you do setup your own box, for a starter, you could do a trial run by downloading something like Virtualbox and install a virtual pfsense (FreeBSD). You can then add as many different networt connections to the virtual pfsense to mirror your dads network connection, and then compare the XML backups to look for differences to learn from.
Virtual box lets you set up some pretty exotic networks virtually and using the physical network connections on the machine, so you can setup some pretty complex networks if you wanted to.Anyway good to here you got the net access working at least. :)