Please help, I've been wrestling with this for a couple of weeks now without success.

The situation:
I'm using a Prism54 USB adapter (Linksys WUSB54AG) under Xubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-7. I've configured the card to start at boot with WEP and static ip using /etc/network/interfaces and /etc/rc.local. The configuration seems OK because when I use the native linux p54usb driver I can connect to router and internet automatically. The problem with the native driver is that it drops the connection constantly- I believe that it drops the connection whenever the signal strength goes below about 50%. Using the Wavelan plugin in XFCE4 I can see that the connection drops once the signal strength goes below 3 bars. This happens constantly because I live in a small apartment block and the router is in the owner/manager's apartment. Using ndiswrapper and the windows driver the connection stays up down to 2 bars.

The problem:
When using the ndiswrapper'd windows driver with the identical configuration (and blacklisting all the native driver files in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and loading ndiswrapper with /etc/modules) the adapter connects properly to the access point and associates with it automatically. I can ping the router but cannot get onto the internet. I checked the output of route and did not see the default gateway (although it is setup in the interfaces file and picked up automatically by the native driver). I added the default gateway using the route add command and then route shows the gateway - but I still can't ping anything beyond the router. Ping outputs that "The network is unreachable". I've tried URL's eg. www.google.com and IP addresses eg. xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx to see if it might be related to the DNS, but can reach neither format of address so, at least in the first instance, the error is not to do with the DNS. I also tried disabling ipv6 using the aliases file but that didn't work either

The questions:
1) Is there any way to make the native p54 driver hold the connection down to relatively low signal strengths?

2) Does anyone know what I should do to make the ndiswrapper'd windows driver access addresses beyond the router, i.e. connect to the internet.

Regards

dreadnyah

PS: Please, no trite answers like get my own internet connection (not allowed), or get another adapter or bridge (can't afford).

UPDATE:

On one reboot a short while ago (one of many today) with ndiswrapper and the windows driver loaded and the identical config as described above (ipv6 enabled system-wide but disabled in Firefox) it connected to the internet for a split second and downloaded one page very quickly then the network became unavailable once again.

I am at a complete loss as to what could cause any of this - someone please help.

Regards
dreadnyah

OK - I've finally solved this - I'm using the ndiswrapper'd Win driver and can now connect to the internet. It was a route problem after all. I was stipulating the netmask as 255.255.255.0 when adding the default gateway with the route add command. I noticed that when using the native driver the output of route showed that the genmask of the default gateway (the router) was 0.0.0.0 - I decided not to specify the netmask in the route command and all is now well. For those who may be interested - the command I used is:

route add default gw 192.168.xxx.xxx wlan0

replace the xxx.xxx with the details for your router.


I've now put that command as the last line (before exit 0) of my /etc/rc.local script and the network starts automatically at boot, holds the connection at lower signal levels than the native driver and automatically updates the kernel route table with the route to the default gateway so I can get on the net as soon as I login.

Regards

dreadnyah