RH9 & at76c503-rfmd won't load at boot
 

:newbie:

Help! I've installed RH9 and got my wireless card to work, but it's refusing to load at boot time - I have to run an extra script to get it to load up.

The card is a Belkin USB device, which works with the st76c503-rfmd driver.

To get it to work manually, I need to do:
modprobe -v at76c503-rfmd
iwconfig wlan0 channel 11 essid WLAN mode managed
ifconfig wlan0 down
ifconfig wlan0 up
dhclient wlan0
/etc/init.d/network restart

The card isn't picked up at boot time, and although I put an ifcfg-wlan0 card in /etc/sysconfig/networking, if I manually modprobe and run ifup, the params don't get picked up - I have to do all of the above to get it working. Also, I have to run ifconfig down and back up, for some reason, before the dhclient call will work, and call network restart after this. In theory, I don't think this should be needed?

I'm running the card in Managed mode with an access point, also Belkin.

I've tried adding the at76c503-rfmd to /etc/modules, but that made no difference.

Does anyone have any ideas how to get this working?

Thanks!
Deb

this is a hotplug device, and as such the hotplug system should be where the module gets loaded and any setup scripts are invoked.

The fact that simply inserting the device does not get the module loaded points to it not being listed in /lib/modules/2.4.20-8/modules.usbmap, grep at76c503 this file to see if that's true or not, this file is updated by depmod and since that is a normal part of rh9 bootup, I'm thinking the location of your module is outside the /lib/modules/2.4.20-8 tree somewhere, perhaps still in the source directory you compiled it from. A symlink to the module(there are actually 3 .o files, right? If so, symlink them all or you may get unresolved symbols) named the same thing and placed somewhere in/under the /lib/modules/2.4.20-8 tree should do the trick, followed by a depmod -a. At that point inserting the device should be all that's required to get the module loaded. This relieves you of the modprobe chore, as for the rest of those commands, first off: my limited experience with this device and module combo is that it will not respond reliably to all iwconfig commands unless it is first assigned an ip address, a catch-22 for dhcp users, but do-able. I recommend you place an ifconfig line in your script before the dhclient call assigning a temporary class c address outside your router's dhcp address range, then the iwconfig lines, and finally the dhclient.

to summarize, remove the reference you made in /etc/modules, place the lines you listed in a script, do away with the modprobe and the ifconfig up/down business, replacing with ifconfig wlan0 10.0.0.1 (up is implied), followed by the iwconfig line, then the dhclient, you can leave the network restart, but comment it out , I suspect you won't need it.

Add a 'post-install at76c503-rfmd your-script-name' line to /etc/modules.conf to invoke your script on module load. This scheme does not make use of all the documented facilites of the linux hotplug system, but until you research that, and by trial and error (like me) find which parts work or not, it should work at boot and on a resume from suspend.

That worked - the network's available at bootup now.

Thanks so much for your help!

good work, more info on linux hotplugging can be found here:
http://linux-hotplug.sourceforge.net/