Cannot Determine wireless IP information in Fedora 3
 

Hi,

Im a newbie with Fedora so hopefully this is an easy solution.
I have a dell latitude laptop. I recently installed a belkin wireless card but to my disappointment fedora did not install/recognize it. However I downloaded the RT2500 driver and the card seems now to work perfectly. Even the utility the comes with the card says that it has no problem finding my college network.
So my problem is.
I am trying to connect to a secure college network. I have entered the correct encryption key in wireless device configuration and seem to have all the other settings entered ok. My wireless card configuration utility says that it has found and established a link to the network. In the Connection Properties data is being sent and received. However once I try to activate the connection in Network Device Control, it tries in vain to determine an IP address and eventually fails. The college wireless network only allows for automatic IP address allocation so I cant manually enter an IP address. (If I do manually enter an address, the connection does activate but I cannot ping anything)
Any help on this problem would be brilliant. I really don�t want to switch back to Windows XP, I would love to get this working. O ya, im using the gnome desktop with fedora 3


Thanks

What encryption does your college use?

128 bit HEX WEP Shared Key Authentication I think

Did you place a dash '-' between every 2 hex symbols, ie. 9D-BI-55-35-G6 ?

This might be off, but are you sure that your network just needs a wep key to connect? At school here, after you connect to the wireless network, you need to start a vpn to get a correct IP and be able to ping other machines etc.

By default Fedora looks for an IP address on the ethernet connection. If this is true, # ifconfig will show loopback(lo) and eth0 interfaces. Bring down eth0 on the command line and bring up the wireless interface.

...or get into the Gnome networking tool, and make sure Gnome has accepted your wireless card as opposed to eth0. I use an rt2500 chipset, and If I last conected with eth0, I sometimes have to tweak things a little to get ra0 recognized.

Thanks for the replies,

I had computer services in my college look at the problem and they were also stumped. The said try using a different wireless PCMICA card. I did but exactly the same problem. Also I put a dual boot of windows xp on my system and in windows the exactly same problem happens. It cannot determine an IP address. They way my college wireless network works it that it uses your MAC address as security along with WEP. When your wireless card broadcasts its MAC address the college network activates the connection as long as the MAC is registered with computer services. I seem to be the only person in the college with this problem. What is getting to me is that I can connect to my ad-hoc network at home with no problem. The cards seem to be working fine on the Laptop but just cant connect to my college network. The WEP key is typed in correctly and all settings seem to be ok.
I only solution I can see is that there is a hardware problem with my cardbus on my laptop. Im giving up now, three wireless cards later and a very ticked off computer store saleman (two returns all ready).

Thanks for all the help. :(