no beep from unidentified wireless card
 

I have a desktop with a PCI => PCMCIA card adapter, and a PCMCIA wireless card, both from Linksys. A lot of places say that when I plug in my card, a beep is supposed to sound. However, I never hear a beep.
But when I plug it in, a red light appears, suppposedly showing an established link. However, it does not let me access the internet. (Also, /sbin/cardctl shows "manfid: 0x%04x, 0x%04x" - obviously unusable)

Does this mean that my PCI => PCMCIA adapter itself doesn't work? Also, because my wireless is a PCMCIA plugged into a PCI, should I follow troubleshoot instructions in the future for PCI, PCMCIA, or both?


Thanks a lot.

A pcmcia bridge, a true one, beeps properly on card insertion. What you have isn't even really what it claims to be, I take it you have a WPC11 pcmcia card and a WDT11 PCI adapter?

When these two guys are together they act just like any given PCI card. Also, NEVER EVER pull that card while the machine is hot. A lot of people think, "oh, its a pcmcia bridge, I can hot yank the card." Yeah, if you're a big fan of baked firmware.

The lights are also meaningless. You can probably get the card to recognize with a simple:

modprobe orinoco_plx

Then check "dmesg" and see if the device registered.

Cheers,

Finegan

Thanks a lot for your reply. modprobe orinoco_plx worked - i checked with dmesg. However, there are still no beeps.

I added "modpobe orinoco_plx" and "wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_autojoin ssid=linksys authtype=opensistem" to the rc.local file (for automatic run at startup), but at the bootup screen, it said it could not identify wlan0.
So then I added "alias wlan0 orinoco_plx" to the /etc/modules.conf file. But this just made the bootup screen say "orinoco_plx device wlan0 does not seem to be present"

Also, I dunno if this means anything, but I also have a regular ethernet port, and I have read that I should disable eth0 or something. Should I do that, and how?

Thanks again.

Well, my PCMCIA doesnt work in Linux, but I have a dual boot and if does work in Windows. Does Linux know that you have a PCMCIA slot (or slots)?

The orinoco drivers are different then the linux-wlan drivers. They work under the normal kernel API, and by the normal ethernet rules, so depending on whether you have a normal wired network card in your box or not, the device will have been assigned the eth1 or eth0 device name. Also, its never going to beep, remember, the plx adapter isn't a real pcmcia bridge, it'll only ever work with another prism2 based pcmcia card.

ifconfig eth1 up
iwconfig eth1 essid linksys
dhcpcd eth1
or, if this is a redhat machine, the other client:
dhclient eth1

If you don't have another ethernet device in the machine, then it'll get eth0, look at the end of "dmesg" to see what ethX it got assigned.

zaphanol,

What's the output of /sbin/lspci? Also, can you paste in the chunk of "dmesg" that refers to pcmcia.

Cheers,

Finegan

When I typed in what you suggested, it kept replying that there was no such device as eth1, so i replaced them all with eth0. Still, i could not restart the network because it could not find orinoco_plx for wlan0.

Here is my ifcfg-wlan0 configuration:
DEVICE=wlan0
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
IPADDR=192.168.0.11
GATEWAY=192.168.0.1
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
NETWORK=192.168.0.0
BROADCAST=192.168.0.255
GATEWAYDEV=wlan0
TYPE=Ethernet ####THIS IS WORRISOME - I have wireless, not ethernet###
USERCTL=yes
PEERDNS=yes

Is there anything that seems to be wrong in this?


Thanks

Okay, fundamental problem here...

The device's name is not going to be wlan0 it is going to be eth0.

Rename the ifcfg-wlan0 script ifcfg-eth0 and change the device name from wlan0 to eth0.

Wireless is ethernet... there's a big misconception that ethernet means cat-5 cabling with RJ-45 connectior heads. Ethernet just referes to the way in which the devices talk., the 802.3 standard if I remember right. Wireless, 802.11b, is just a layer above ethernet so its just a matter of getting the devices to see one another in radio-land, and then all of the communication is ethernet.

The BSDs, like FreeBSD for instance, and MacOS for that matter, name their networking devices after the chipset, not the service... so there's a ne0 and an ne3, and since they have one driver for almost all of the common wireless cards... wi0

When the linux-wlan group and Lucent both developed their first wireless drivers, they settled on wlan0 and wvlan0 respectively just due to some fundamental ho-ji-what-its, probably BSD influenced... that's a guess. All of the stock, in kernel drivers will assign a device name of ethX.

If you edit /etc/modules.conf and add:

alias eth0 orinoco_plx

It should load the module on boot and apply all of the changes from the ifcfg-eth0 file.

Cheers,

Finegan