Hello all,

I am running RHEL 4 on a ThinkPad R52. I am having problems getting my wireless network card configured completley. Here's the card:

Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)

I downloaded and installed the Madwifi drivers from http://www.madwifi.org and followed their newbie howto. I successfully installed the driver, got the wireless connection running and connected to my AP and connected to the internet.

Here's my questions/problems:

When I boot into Gnome, it sees my card as wifi0. However, after installing the madwifi driver the card is recognized as ath0, and that's what I used to get it working. Now when the OS boots it still tries to bring up wifi0 not ath0. How do I change it so it will use ath0?

Also, how do I make it so the when I setup the wireless card the setting stick? Everytime I reboot I have to reset up the card?

Thanks for any help.

Try investigating your /etc/modprobe.conf file.

I use ndiswrapper and it puts an entry in there something like
Hopefully you will see something like
alias wifi0 $somthing
and you could possibly change that wifi0 to ath0, or maybe there is an entry for wifi0 and ath0.

Also try as root
system-config-network
and in that gui you can specify which device to load on startup. Hopefully wifi0 will be an option to not start on boot and you can add ath0 instead.

When you say everytime you restart you have to resetup the card, what exactly do you mean. Are you talking about typing modprobe ath0, or a few other commands. You can add whatever commands you want to run at boot time under /etc/rc.local

Okay, things are somewhat working. I can get my wireless card working though I always have to set the ap mac address and enable authmode 2 on the command line. How do I get the wireless nic to do this automatically? Do I need to edit one of my config files in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/?

What I don't understand is why my laptop tries to bring up ath0 and wifi0 during boot up. Both error out and I always have to set the items I mentioned above by hand before ath0 works. How does ath0 releate to wifi0?

In my /etc/modprobe.conf file I have listed:

alias wifi0 ath_pci

Why is it not pointing to ath0?

I also added these 2 lines to originally get things working:

install ath0 /sbin/modprobe ath_pci; /usr/bin/wlanconfig ath0 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode sta
remove ath0 /usr/bin/wlanconfig ath0 destroy; /sbin/modprobe -r ath_pci

On my FC4 box, command/scripts that I want to run when I do an ifup <dev> I add them to here, it should be similar to RHEL
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-wireless
So you could probably add your authmode 2 command in there somewhere.

I was browsing the howto and saw this
http://madwifi.org/wiki/UserDocs/autocreate
It basically explains that through the following command
You are creating a managed virtual access point (VAP) wifi0. I am not sure if you need this, I am not that knowledgable with the new atheros drivers as it is a new feature as of January.

Also, on creating the interface header on this guide, there is a short description about VAP's which you are creating with that command
http://madwifi.org/wiki/UserDocs/FirstTimeHowTo

I don'y fully understand the VAP stuff, however I would see what happens if you comment that wifi0 stuff out. This is a fairly new feature, and I have not read all the docs on it yet.