weird wired/wireless issue - swap the two?

Terrier_Jimlad · 1 Mar 2009 at 16:37

Quick brief ... all NHS trusts on the national programme connect to the SPINE which houses all smartcard authentication details. As you insert your smartcard and enter your PIN, the software goes off to the spine, checks your details, grabs your roles and gives you your roles.

Hard wired, this is fine, it works as normal. However, as soon as you disabled the NIC, reboot, and go on to Wireless what so ever, regardless of what wireless NIC/USB adapter or drivers/software you use.

Now the access to the spine is in the background using SSL ...

Is there anything within Windows XP (sp2) that would be causing this? The whole of our deptartment are baffled by it ... the only problem we face is, we're not allowed to rebuild these machines with our own XP as we're tied in to contracts that dont let us

Any ideas anyone?

Thanks in advance

J.B · 1 Mar 2009 at 17:50

Id imagine that the software that recognises the smart card and PIN is programmed to use the wired ethernet adaptor and always assumes you'll be wired in.

Just thinking allowed here, have you tried contacting the people who made the smartcard and PIN software. Obviously I dont know, but that would be my guess.

Terrier_Jimlad · 1 Mar 2009 at 18:29

It works fine on some other Dell builds and laptops, just not these 50 x HP Workstations we've got ...

tolien · 1 Mar 2009 at 19:08

roflcakes22 said:
Hard wired, this is fine, it works as normal. However, as soon as you disabled the NIC, reboot, and go on to Wireless what so ever, regardless of what wireless NIC/USB adapter or drivers/software you use.

Presume you're missing "it doesn't work" in there.

Does it work at all (i.e. does it even work if you wait a while)? Is there any throughput across the network while it's trying to connect? Can you see it even trying to connect to whatever's at the other end?