The standard network on JHU wireless, available at least on the homewood campus, requires an authentication upon succesful connection to the wireless, even if you have the right WEP key.

If you are running linux or any other machine where you’d like an automated transition between networks, it is difficult to do this seemlessly.

This perl script will fill in that form and authenticate for you. Make sure it runs immediately after a connection to standard has been established.

Note: Depending on your distribution and level of expertise, there are different ways to establish a wireless connection on your typical linux. On Fedora for example, a typical way is to export the ESSID and KEY (as well as any other variables you might need) as environment variables and then call ifup. This could be done by another automated script that is configured to detect available wireless networks and roam among them. Many solutions like this one are available on the internet.

See Also:
Official information on JHU Wireless

Jean Tourrilhes guide to Wireless Linux

Autoroam is a simple python script for the automatic roaming of preconfigured wireless networks, with a capability of defaulting to unencrypted networks. Requires iwtools. Start this during boot time and never manually switch between networks again.