Hi
Just installed a new 3COM 3CRDW696 card and upgraded from red Hat 7.3 to Red Hat 9. However, Although my fixed LAN card is working (it was under 7.3) the new 3CRDW696 isn't. Its a wireless card but its not showing in the hardware list. Is the card too new and do I therefore need to try and build a driver and if so how?

Thanks

Ash

Linux doesn't like hardware reconfigurations. Chances are you'll need to rebuild your kernel.

Or just re-install fresh.

I took out a soundcard (filled the only ISA slot) and replaced it with a SCSI card (aha 1520b). The system freaked.

So I put my /usr/local, /etc, /root, and /home directories onto /www (a seperate hard drive, luckily). Then I did a fresh install and selectively copied files back from /etc onto the new system. (passwd, shadow, smb.conf, ntpd.conf, /etc/postfix/*, etc).

Or you could just build a new kernel yourself. But all those friggin' questions it asks are just too much for most mere mortals.

Or you could just use google.com to figure out what kernel driver you need and try an "insmod <driver name>".


Good luck.

-Ed.

Hi
I got it to work - No Kernel recompile. I can ping and use Samba without a problem. Perhaps we can add these cards to the list of cards that work.

I will post full details of how it was done later (its not as straight forward as you might imagine. I poked around of posts posts for the final clue to the puzzle)

More later

ash

umm.. could u post some info on how u go the card working?
imm trying to push linux forward @ my company, but need suport for 3crdw696.. id really like to hear how u got it to work.
(distro, kernel etc...)

tnx in advance..

a

Hi
ok here we go (with apologies for replying to my own post because I understand its not the done thing)

I have two machines on my home network (Fuzzy and Biscuit) running on the domain hamster. (The names of the machines are after now long departed hamsters) Fuzzy is the linux machine running Red Hat version 9 shrike Kernel 2.4.20-9-19.9 on an i686. I chose the install everything option when I did the red Hat install. The physical hardware is an Gigabyte motherboard with a duron 750 chip (quite old now) and half a gig of memory. Biscuit is another Athlon based machine with 128 memory - it has a nasty virus which all the virus killers such as Norton can see but are unable to remove - the virus is MS Windows 98!

When I first started networking I bought two Belkin cards with a long cable between them (complete with crossover). But recently I aquired a broadband (NTL) connection so I wanted to run both machines on a wireless network. I purchased a NetGear router which has four fixed ports and one broadband port. I plugged the router into the broadband and then set up Biscuit and Fuzzy to talk to the router for internet services. It's important to remember that both machines still contain their fixed cards as well - in Fuzzy's case this means that the wireless card is running as eth1.

I must confess that when I bought the two wireless cards I just assumed that being 3Comm they would just work. In the case of Biscuit it did (but there again it mentions all the MS operating systems on the box) It does not mention Linux - but I assumed that the latest version of Reh Hat would be ok.

The following is taken from my log of the experience (its not a bad idea to log everything you do on a Linux machine as its easy to either miss something or make a setting that later stops something else - you have something to look back on off line as you work on the next move.)


1. Installed the 3Com card into Fuzzy and rebooted.
2. The card is not mentioned at boot time Nor did it show in the hardware list under networking - this is when I posted the original question. - Referred to Red Hat Linux Bible 7.3 by Chris Negus and discover that this is not unusual.
3. opened file /etc/sysconfi/pcmcia and changed to the following (NB: Always back up the old file first - you never know when you might need to switch back)

PCMCIA=yes
PCIC=i82365
PCIC_OPTS=
CORE_OPTS=

I am not strictly sure about the second line but I left it in and no problems so far - perhaps a guru can jump in here and help.

I opened the tool System Settings | Network Configuration Network from the gui and tried to set the card up by hitting new and selecting Wireless Connection. On the next screen I hit Other Wireless Card and on the screen after tried each of the 3Comm drivers. Nothing happing it couldn't even see the card.

4. Started contemplating buying a new Wireless card that is on the list of compatible software. Started looking around LinuxQuestions etc for other people having problems and realised that a lot was being said about the Orinoco driver - its mentioned in the book I referenced above too. Now I know that in some cases many components are made in one factory for different manufacturers - I know of one case where monitors from some very well known manufactures used to go down the same production line in slightly different cases. (All where tested by the same guys etc) I just wondered if 3Comm could have bought in the bits for their cards too. Sine I had about £60 worth of card just sitting there I thought I would give it a try. So I added the following to /etc/modules.conf
alias eth1 orinoco_pci

5. Restarted PCMCIA and Networking (just to be on the safe side) and the card appeared under System Settings | Network Configuration Network. You can use the tool to configure the card - it writes a file to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 as follows - I have edited out site info with < comment > You need to replace these with your site stuff (remove the <> as well). When using the tool make sure you select the Lucent Orinoco and Prism II-based PCMCIA driver. I am not sure where that info ends up - its not in the file below.

# Please read /usr/share/doc/initscripts-*/sysconfig.txt
# for the documentation of these parameters.
USERCTL=no
PEERDNS=no
GATEWAY=<the ip address of the router>
TYPE=Wireless
DEVICE=eth1
HWADDR=<hardware address (mac address) of the wireless card>
BOOTPROTO=none
NETMASK=<Network mask>
ONBOOT=yes
IPADDR=<if address of Fuzzy on the network>
NETWORK=<Base Network Address>
NAME=Fuzzy_Wireless
DOMAIN=hamster
ESSID=<Name of the network that the router uses)
CHANNEL=<channel number>
MODE=Managed
KEY=<SEP Key>
RATE=11Mb/s
DHCP_HOSTNAME=
BROADCAST=<Network Broadcast Address>

I suggest you try and get things working without the wep key if you can first - but later you need to add the encryption back and add extra protection on the router.

6. Ping the router - success!

7. Restarted the Samba server, mounted the right shares and copied a file from Biscuit. File copies no problems - yes

8. Actually no! Tried to copy a large folder from Biscuit to Fuzzy (using Fuzzy) The copy went fine at first and then stopped. It seemed that copying large amounts of data either way using either machine caused problems. By large I mean in excess of a couple of meg.

9. Tried the alternative Lucent Driver driver but no luck. The card stops copying after a few meg - why? Set a ping away over night - still working in the morning. But again when I passed large volumes across it failed. Card was just unresponsive.

10. Back to Linux questions board and discover this is a known problem with Orinoco cards. The answer I see is to load 13e (the latest stable version) I surf (using Biscuit who is the only one with the modem working at this point) to

http://ozlabs.org/people/dgibson/dldwd/

and download 13e onto Biscuit. Then mapping drive again on Fuzzy I pull the download across - it's not too big so the card handles the tar without a problem. I follow the instructions (a couple of commands as root) and the new driver is installed. Restart the networking again and try a large folder - works. I try pulling nearly 500 meg across. It takes a while but it works too!!!

Note: I thought about using wlan but when I pulled the Athlon stuff across I got an M5 error - I have reported this to the web site.

And that is all there is to it!. I don't think I missed anything out but if you have more questions please ask. BTW Could you fill in your details on Linux Questions? - your post will then have the version distribution of Linux you use etc automatically. If you arn't using Red Hat then still give the above a try. Remember that some distributions have files in slightly different places.

Finally, If anyone is reading this and sees any problems or shortcuts could you add to the above?

Thanks

Ash, first, thanks for your instructions. They helped me to get my 3CRDW696 working. You asked for shortcuts, so here's my suggestion.

I thought the 3CRDW696 wireless card was a PCI device, and it didn't sound as if the orinoco_pci driver needed pcmcia either, so I disabled the pcmcia service entirely on my RedHat v9, to see what happened.

Once I added
alias eth1 orinoco_pci
into /etc/modules.conf, the card was seen on reboot and I configured it using the Network Configuration tool as you described. I could see using lsmod that some sensible-looking modules were installed and working, and sure enough, I had a network connection.

I did follow your suggestion and installed the latest driver (13e).

So, the shortcut is simple. You don't need to do anything with your pcmcia configuration, it is not relevant to installing the 3CRDW696 wireless card.

Hello,

I am trying to install new 3COM 3CRDW696 on Redhat 9.0 . I tried to follow instructions from ashleyfrazer (Did you install the card and driver on your laptop/notebook?). But I am still getting some problems.

The WLAN card is detected but when I run the Aodv (during make install step) code it gives some unresolved symbol error.

Q 1. Is PCMCIA works only for laptops? what about desktops? If it works only for laptops/notebook, is there any way I can make it work for desktops.

Can anyone help me in this regard? Your help is highly appriciated.

Thanks

Hi
The card went into a desktop machine. The reason for the references to PCMCIA is that the book I was using also referenced it. I now think the reason was that the cards mentioned in the book (which were quite old) where being fitted to a desktop via some kind of adaptor. ie an PCI card with some kind of PCMCIA socket on it. Is this possible??

Thanks to the reply from ctucker - it seems to confirm that the PCMCIA stuff is a red hamster. PCMCIA is as far I am aware a laptop thing and can therefore be ignored

Did you try the install as root? Are you running 13e or some later variant?

If you put the errors on the board some guru (not me I am afraid) may be able to help

Regards

Ash

Thanks for the reply ashleyfrezer..

I got the card working on my Linux box. About the 13e driver, I tried to compile it on RedHat 9.0 and it gave some error. But with RedHat 8.0 the driver is working fine.

Regards
Guam

I can't find /etc/modules.conf, in red hat 7.3, can any one tell me where in my system I can find it, or which is the equivalent in 7.3, so I can add the alias eth1 orinoco_pci.

Thanks