I was going to post this in the hardware forum, but I thought this might be more appropriate. I have a wireless USB interface that I have configured in Redhat 9. It works perfectly without WEP enabled. With WEP enabled, it can't communicate with my wireless router on bootup, even though I have my ifcfg file altered with the settings for my network.

At first I had a problem with the MODE option in my ifcfg file. My wireless device won't accept that option, and it comes back with a segmentation fault. At any rate, after I fixed that by editing the ifcfg file, I still couldn't get the network to work. Finally, I discovered that if I execute "iwconfig eth0 key on" and then do "ifup ifcfg-eth0" (which is my wireless interface) everything works.

So the question is - how can I automate this? I would assume there's something I can put in my ifcfg file that would do this automatically, correct? If so, what would that be? If not, how should I run the first command on boot up?

TIA

The syntax is:
KEY=12345abcdefg ...
Enter that in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethx and you should be able to avoid having to set the WEP key every time you reboot.

I know that, and I already have that in the file and it's working fine. My problem is that I need to be able to run the "iwconfig eth0 key on" command. Just having KEY=xxxxxxxxxxxx in there for some reason doesn't work with my wireless device. I have to specifically run "iwconfig eth0 key on" before I run "ifup ifcfg-eth0".

Maybe I'll post a copy of my ifcfg file because I might have something else messed up.

Thanks

Alright, here's my ifcfg file with "sensitive" info altered:

--------------------------------
DEVICE=eth0
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
DOMAIN=
NETMASK=
HWADDR=
TYPE=Wireless
DHCP_HOSTNAME=
IPADDR=
USERCTRL=no
PEERDNS=no
GATEWAY=
ESSID=mynet
CHANNEL=1
KEY=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
RATE=Auto
-----------------------------------

As I mentioned above, this will let me connect to my network as long as I run iwconfig first. I'm wondering if this is caused because I can't have a MODE=whatever line in my ifcfg file. Any ideas?

Thanks for any help, even if you just read this and don't know the answer.

(I wish I had my RH drive installed to check, but I'm running Slack this AM.)
Maybe a conflict with the channel and the mode setting. Try deleting the channel entry and setting MODE=managed or auto.

Hi again,
I'll give that a try and see what happens. I tried executing iwconfig with the mode command before and got the same segfault, though. But hopefully it'll work differently.

Thanks again!

Nope, still doesn't work unfortunately. Same segfault as I had at first.