Hi all,

I've posted this over at forums.gentoo.org, but since I'm desperate and in urgent need of help, I'll post here as well:

I boot gentoo. iwconfig gives me this:

few seconds later, the ap address is shown as 00:00:00:00:00:00, when executing the same command.

I try to connect with "iwconfig eth1 mode managed ap any", but that doesn't change anything.

I try booting with kanotix, and everything just works fine (using kanotix liveCD right now), wireless gets configured IP-address is retrieved, etc., (only thing is that the interface is eth0 in kanotix, instead of eth1)

Please, any indications of what the reason for this can be would make me very very thankful...

Does your essid get reset or changed as well?

Thank you so much for the reply!

Strangely enough, it doesn't get reset:

and if "scan networks" in kwifimanager, Amani does show up, but connection speed/strength remains at nil...

EDIT: Oh, sorry... seems only nickname remains, not ESSID

OK... after half an hour or so, kwifimanager showed activity, iwconfig showed ap address, I tried to retrieve an ip address with dhcp, and then everything disappeared. But, ESSID remained:

That's strange. If you have your essid set and no other security on you should be able to use dhcp and get the address. Can you maybe set everything static to see if that works?

I don't think I can set a static IP, as I wouldn't know what that would be (it's not my AP - just one for open access).

But on another note, I rebooted into an older install of gentoo (I tend to have one install for playing around with), and it seemed as if some sort of scan was going on all the time. iwconfig was hooked on one ap address and the signal strength varied a bit each time I executed iwconfig. But even so, "dhcpcd eth1", returned nothing...

(if nothing helps, I think I'm gonna install some other distro (probably arch) to see if that makes a difference). Thanks again for the reply, really appreciate it.

Are you having trouble with any other machines? You may be getting interference. Microwaves and cordless phones are the two biggest culprits. I cannot use channels 1-4 at all and 5 & 6 are poor at best at my apartment complex because of a microwave antenna tower. Try different channels and check your SNR. Use the channel where you get the best SNR. (Edit: Sorry - SNR = Signal to Noise Ratio)

RK

Thanks alot for the suggestions - I'll sure keep that in mind for the future. However, I've gone done to the university now, where there's an open wlan connection for student. The signal here is very good, and I'm posting this using their connection, although under another O$. For unfortunately, I still have the same problem.

Since everything worked out-of-the-box when I booted with Kanotix liveCD, I'm thinking this might be something Gentoo specific (hence my leaning towards trying another distro) -- but what could that be?

Well are you new to gentoo or not? Cause I think you have to configure a lot yourself in there. Kanotix probably uses default settings and that's why it works out of the box. I don't know about distros, cause I find it quite hard to say if something will work if we don't know what's the problem.

Well if all's ok you should be able to get dhcp info after you set the essid (so it knows which network to connect to). So it kind of depends on what you like. Want a source based distro, take a look at slack. Kanotix is debian based I think (don't install woody if you want to try debian!) but I guess it's pretty different from debian.

I'm not particularly new to gentoo, but I'm pretty new to wlan cards Actually, Gentoo comes with really good default options in most config files, it's a lot easier to maintain than Debian in my opinion, just as long as one doesn't compile the stuff using crazy CFLAGS. Kanotix was actually my first linux distro ever; it becomes a debian sid upon install - but I've always found the config files in debian being all misplaces, but that's probably cause I'm used to gentoo... Thank for the input though

I have some new information, as well, on my problem. I just got back home from uni, not planning to try around with this again, I plugged in my network cable. What besides my eth0 coming up, was that eth1 came up and remained so for long enough for me to give dhcpcd eth1 a try. And to my utter surprise, an ip number was retirieved and nothing went down.

Now; the only difference between this attempt and any other is simply that eth0 is up as well. So, my guess now is that something's getting mixed up between eth0 and eth1 (remember Kanotix saw my wlan as eth0). Could this be pointing in any direction of my problem?

EDIT: These are some further steps in my troubleshooting: So I had eth0 & eth1 up, signal strength shows alright. What I did was stopping eth0, and trying to retrieve ip number again with dhcpcd eth1. What happens? Signal disappears completely and I'm back with a bunch of 0:s in my ap address... I wait for long enough to make sure that nothing's gonna change. Then I bring eth0 back up, still no signal. I turn off the wlan switch, and then back on -> excellent signal... There's definitely something to this... But what?

Lol that's pretty strange behaviour. I've seen it helped to unplug extra connections to make it work but not yet that it helped to plug extra things in. Maybe you can try to get your wlan card to eth0 unless you need the cable there?

Yeah, you're right it's really strange... I could try to do that though. But I have no clue of how to trick the OS to make my wlan become eth1... except perhaps if recompile the kernel to have network card modules, and then try without loading them... yeah, I'll try that. Thanks

Nah... didn't help. I just had address 00:00:00...etc. all the time... what next?

I wouldn't know. Like everything seems random. The only thing is plugging that cable in. I wouldn't know how that helps your wireless.

Thanks for your help so far. I've no clue of what to do next and this might actually be the end of my gentoo days (since everything's working fine under archlinux, I might just move over)... we'll see...