ldopa.net

So on the whole, I’ve been pretty damn pleased with the iPhone. It’s kind of amazing to have full-on email and web everywhere I go. But I’ve noticed one annoying bug that’s been driving me crazy, and I’ve come to call it ‘the Linksys bug’. You contract the Linksys bug like this:

1. Get tired of the iPhone asking to join wifi networks, and turn that ‘feature’ off.
2. Now, go into public and try and find an open wifi network.
3. Without fail, you’ll eventually find an open one with the default name of ‘Linksys’.
4. Go ahead and hop on the open Linksys network, and perform whatever nefarious wifi task you wanted to do.
5. Eventually you’ll walk by another ‘Linksys’ network. This one, however, will be locked down with a WEP password and will confuse the heck out of your iPhone, because hey! it thought that the ‘Linksys’ network was open, man. You will not know the password, nor will you be able to tell your iPhone to forget about the damn ‘Linksys’ network. If you walk around a lot, you will be prompted to not know the password five or six times per day.
6. OPTIONAL: Be amazed at the number of people who use the default, out-of-the-box wifi network name of ‘Linksys’. Have these people no creativity?

You can fix this, though:

1. Install the iPhone installer.
2. Use the newly installed Installer.app to install “Term-vt100″.
3. (OPTIONAL: Install the BSD subsystem and OpenSSH while you’re there).
4. Run “Term-vt100″ from the main iPhone ‘Springboard’ screen. Input this line and hit return:
   
   rm ~/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.wifi.plist
   
5. Restart your iPhone by holding down the top button. After it reboots, it will have forgetten about all your wireless networks, including the annoying stuck Linksys one.

~Jeff