Two high pitched beeps just means it bound "a" module to the card, lets figure out which one it is. What's listed with the command:

/sbin/lspci

If prism2_cs is there, the device must have registered right. Look at the goop from the command "dmesg" and you should see a mountain of prism card spam.

Bring it up with the command:

ifconfig wlan0 up

Then hopefully you can just tell it to grab an IP address and other goop with:

dhcpcd wlan0

You can't manually modprobe pcmcia modules, cardmgr has to do that for you. Well, okay there are a few you actually can, but that's weird hotplug stuff and these cards don't fall under that category.

iwconfig doesn't work, or more to the point, isn't entirely supported yet with the prism2_cs drivers, so just stick to the wlan-ng.otps file.

Luck,

Finegan

Finegan,

You'd helped my configure my WPC11v3. I was going to enable encryption, but since I thought hermes supported just 40 bit(key length) encryption and my base access point had only 64 and 128 bit choices, I had to drop the idea. Also, how is the encryption scheme related to key-length? Do they use standard routines like 3DES?

3DES, no, oh my I wish, the encryption is down there in the layering, at the hardware level, hence when WEP was first cracked about 2 years ago there was nothing to do, WEP was in the 802.11 standard.

Hermes will go higher than 40-bit which is the key length for what is called 64bit WEP, as far as I know it'll do a 104-bit key which is 128-bit WEP. For instance the Orinoco Silver cards can only do 64 which the Gold will do both. Offhand I think the only difference between the two cards is firmware, but I've cracked two open out of boredom to be sure. I don't understand why there's a friggin' dichotomy, maybe its like how the hardware industry calls a Megabyte, 1000000Bytes while everyone else knows its really 1048576Bytes.

Cheers,

Finegan

finegan,

You rule!!
I have a Dell Inspiron 8100 with Linksys WPC11, and your few-step explanation quoted below did the trick for me. I should probably mention that I was at total loss after struggling with my card until I stumbled onto your post.

Rock on!

Matt

Makes sense. I was wondering if there's something really wrong with WEP why cant anyone fix it!!

I'm going to upgrade my laptop to RH 8.0 one of these days and then we'll do some talking.

I have the same problem...I get everything working properly, but I do not get any DHCP information...

The iwconfig shows all wireless info, but I get no ip address, subnet mask, router, etc. etc.

Anyone have any ideas?

--Jeff

What card? also what distro and what driver set, I can't remember which were covered here, most likely this is a WPC11 v2.5, orinoco drivers, and RedHat 8.0?

Then again I may be way off. If it is Rh 8.0, that now uses a different dhcp client daemon, dhclient, than what everyone else uses, dhcpcd.

Also, you may try manually configuring your route:

ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.23 up
route add default gw 192.168.1.1

(assuming the 192.168.1.x IP block, use your own of course.)

ping 192.168.1.1

If that works, then at least the drivers are working and the rest can be sorted out in the long run.

Cheers,

Finegan

She can see the ap now fine...Since I compiled wlan from source. But if I say for example
iwconfig wlan0 essid marksland
I get function not implemented rather then a command prompt of joy...Sigh. It does that on anything that I try to set. I had a acx100 card with drivers installed that worked. According to service pcmcia stop the acx100 driver is not loaded.

Any ideas?

The linux-wlan.net drivers don't actually comply at all with the wireless extensions API at all, so all of the "iw" commands won't do anything. Configuration info in /etc/wlan should help you sort it out, everything gets fed to the driver on module load. It should still work by editting /etc/pcmcia/wlan-ng.opts by hand.

Cheers,

Finegan

is that file read at boot time or when the service starts? I rather need to configure it for two different networks. Two different essid's one has wep enabled, the other (presently) does not..... With the acx100 (now defunct) i could set them on the fly and it happily talked to either network.......

When service starts, its been a while since I messed with the linux-wlan.net drivers, but last I checked, you have to manually restart pcmcia after making manual changes to a file in order to switch networks... then again, it has been years, all of the documentation would explain it faster, and that's in /etc/wlan

Also,

There's two entire other drivers for this card, the orinoco_cs set that sometimes bogs down on newer firmware and the host_ap modules, which work fine in managed and ad-hoc modes too.

Cheers,

Finegan

orinoco_cs is what i had been using in coridnation with the linux-wlan... i can probably do a script that will cp the approperiate network into place and then restart pcmcia to make it read the changes, but is there a better solution that would just allow me to set the parameters on the fly and go?

Hmmm...

The linux-wlan.net modules are one set of drivers for the prism2 chipset, under /sbin/lsmod they'll be listed as prism2_cs, p8211, etc... As far as I know, the settings have to handed to the module on module load, which means a hard restart of pcmcia every time you want to change essids...

The orinoco_cs modules are part of the default kernel and should have loaded for the card originally. They are compliant with the wireless tools api and should take commands like "iwconfig eth0 essid bob" and so forth.

Which ones are you using?

Cheers,

Finegan

iwconfig <enter> reports that wlan0 can see whichever ap i'm in range of....either home or work. but when i say ifconfig wlan0 essid whatever it comes back and says function not impolemented for device wlan0. i don't believe eth0 shows up but maybe ifconfig will say differently..... should iwconfig show eth0 as well if its defined?

Actually, do you just have the "dmesg" dump for when the driver loaded? I haven't successfully dealt with this linuxant stuff yet. The only laptop I had around to abuse up until recently is running Gentoo, and what they patch the kernel with does not work out with linuxant's wrappers.

Cheers,

Finegan