Increasing attenuation

Hi, I have a scene with lighting and shading looking good on my surfaces. On a plane however, all the normals point up, and I get the same color across the phane, no gradient. The mesh is very dense so that’s not the problem. I can adjust the attenuation factor or the type in real time and it doesn’t even make a noticable difference. Does this sound right? How can I make my light to have extreme falloff so that one side of the phane is lit all the way, the other is lit halfway. I know I can just interpolate it myself, but I’m wondering about doing it in openGL.

How do you have your ambient set? Above 0.2 for each color component is usually too much.