Hi.. I'm so new to linux it hurts.

I use redhat 7.2, and a linksys wpc11 wireless pcmcia card
on my Dell inspiron 7000 laptop to connect to a windows network at home.

Although the red/green lights on the card seem to light up and I heard redhat 7.2 supports this card since it is based on the intersil Prism2 11mbps Wireless adapter, I can't seem to connect to the network or access the internet through the network.

So far this is what I know:

1)My KDE Control Center under PCMCIA seems to recognize the card is there by listing the intersil Prism2 11mbps Wireless adapter.

2)My hardware browser under PCMCIA seems not to recognize the card and says I have some texas instrument PCI1220 card using a yenta_socket driver

3) these are the files that somehow relate to my wireless connection:
-etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-irlan0
-etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-wireless
-etc/pcmcia/wireless
-etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts

4) I enter a domain in the location window of my browser and I get an error message telling me "unknown host"

Anyone know how I can connect to the internet or if I am even connected to a network?

Nate

Well I do know a few things about laptops. I worked Dell Tech support for a while and recognized a couple of your terms. The part about seeing the Texas Instruments PCI card is somewhat true. Your pcmcia sockets are based on the TI chipset and that is wehre it is reading the stuff on the TI. I hope this will help you some.

Thanks. (At least someone thought about my problem)

ok... I guess that kinda helps.

So that leads me to believe that the hardware profiles are not in conflict. The intersil drivers for wireless lan are installed somewhere on my computer and the texas instrument reference has no real relevance to my wireless lan. So all the proper drivers are recognized as they should be.

So now that leaves me to assume I have to do some editing to those wireless config files that I mentioned before.

Any suggestions as to what type of editing I should be doing to those files to receive a dhcp-issued ip address so I can be considered on the network?

:Nate:

what does your irlan-eth0 file look like. That is where I setup my NIC card to be dhcp setup.

The problems with getting this to work are probably on the driver level. There are two driver sets that cover the prism2 series cards, and I'm pretty sure RH 7.2 is using the better of the two: orinoco_cs and friends. In order to configure the card with the network name (essid) and channel and such you're going to have to use a command line program called "iwconfig", which was almost definately part of your RH installation. To see what modules you are actually using, try: "lsmod". Hopefully orinoco_cs and orinoco are a part of the mess.

This may seem like a hastle, but before the orinoco_cs drivers the only thing covering prism 2 was this alpha-mess called linux-wlan-ng.

Luck,

Finegan

This stuff sounds familiar Finnegan just recently finished helping me out with my wireless mess. I have everything all straghtened out and I'd be glad to give you a hand if you're still having problems...

Finnegan:

iwconfig says-
lo no wireless extensions

and lsmod does not have any mention of orinocon. (It does mention wvlan_cs, amd ds [which is used by wvlan_cs])

This does not look good to me.

----------------

bbenz3:

Do you mean the ifcfg-eth0 and ifcfg-irlan0?
If so... this is the output of ifcfg-irlan0:

DEVICE=irlan0
BOOTPRONTO=dhcp
IPADDR=""
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
ONBOOT=no


Perhaps I should change ONBOOT to yes?
I don't think eth0 s important since I am not on an ethernet, right?

:Nate:

jbanafato:

Any help/suggestions is appreciated.... since by doing nothing so far my laptop is as useful as a paperweight.

wvlan_cs is the older version of the orinoco driver set that was built strictly for Lucent chipset cards. The new in-kernel pcmcia cardbus drivers somehow associates prism2 cards with the wvlan_cs module. It thinks this is the right driver for the job, but it isn't. I checked around a little and now I'm almost certain that you have the orinoco drivers on your machine. Does this turn up anything:

locate orinoco

hopefully in the /lib/modules directories?

If so, go here and download the file called hermes.conf and copy it into the directory /etc/pcmcia. Then try the following command:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia restart

This should restart pcmcia from pcmcia_core up. If that doesn't work because I have the directories wrong, just yank and re-insert the card.

If you hear two more or less identical high pitched beeps, try:

ifconfig eth1 up (this thing's normal onboard ethernet is eth0, right?)

iwconfig eth1

If the second beep is more of a bonk, check lsmod and see what it loaded.

You set the IP address with ifconfig and all of the networkID, encryption garbage with iwconfig. If you need any help with that, post back. Hopefully that should all work.

Cheers,

Finegan

After reading some other posts, the below should probably be just a guidline: For instance, eth0 might need to be eth1, wavelan2_cs may not be compatible with your card. Proceed with caution
-------------------

I've never used redhat or other commercial distros, so I'm not familiar with their fanciness. From what I've heard, it's scripts are all mangled, but I'm sure somebody here can probably tell you where to put what information. Okay, here's what I think...

To start:

1) Hopefully you control the access point you're trying to connect to. If so, disable any encryption and allow access to all (meaning do not restrict access by MAC address, etc.). The less complex the better for right now.

2) Edit your config scripts to disable DHCP for the time being. If something fails, DHCP takes a long time to time out and just adds complexity. Let's get the card recognized first.

To disable dhcp, I'd probably start with the ifcfg-eth0 file and change BOOTPROTO="dhcp" line. Please help me out, redhat guys...

Now:

If you only have one nic, wireless or otherwise, card services should try to set it up as eth0. iwconfig reporting "lo: ..." suggests to me that eth0 is not configured and the network is not running. At the very least, should see:

$ iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions
eth0 no wireless extensions

However, if lsmod reports that wvlan_cs and ds are loaded, then it seems like the hardware is working alright. You can try to manually start the network and see what happens. (This is where redhat knowledge comes in...) I'm guessing that you should be able to do

/etc/pcmcia/network start eth0

Now type iwconfig again. You should see eth0 in there.

Let me know if any of that works. If it does, then you're getting somewhere. You have a couple options, also. You should get away from the wvlan_cs driver and move up to either wavelan2_cs or orinoco_cs. I'll explain all of that when you get there.

Hope some of this helps.

-Joe

okay... with the first approach this is the output

finegan:



root@localhost root]# /etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia restart

Shutting down PCMCIA services: cardmgr modulesds: Device or resource busy
yenta_socket: Device or resource busy
pcmcia_core: Device or resource busy
.
Starting PCMCIA services: cardmgr.

[root@localhost root]# lsmod
Module Size Used by
orinoco_cs 4944 1
orinoco 28096 0 [orinoco_cs]
hermes 3776 0 [orinoco_cs orinoco]
nls_iso8859-1 2832 1 (autoclean)
nls_cp437 4352 1 (autoclean)
vfat 9584 1 (autoclean)
fat 32384 0 (autoclean) [vfat]
maestro 27360 1 (autoclean)
soundcore 4464 2 (autoclean) [maestro]
binfmt_misc 6416 1
ds 7056 4 [orinoco_cs]
yenta_socket 9488 2
pcmcia_core 41600 0 [orinoco_cs ds yenta_socket]
autofs 11520 0 (autoclean) (unused)
appletalk 20912 0 (autoclean)
ipx 16448 0 (autoclean)
ipchains 39200 0
usb-uhci 21536 0 (unused)
usbcore 51712 1 [usb-uhci]
ext3 64624 2
jbd 40992 2 [ext3]

[root@localhost root]# ifconfig eth1 up
eth1: unknown interface: No such device

[root@localhost root]# ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:03:2F:00:C1:A3
inet addr:192.168.0.197 Bcast:192.168.0.255
Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MTU:1500
Metric:1
RX packets:30 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:5 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0
RX bytes:4438 (4.3 Kb) TX bytes:2704 (2.6 Kb)

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:235 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:235 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0
RX bytes:15294 (14.9 Kb) TX bytes:15294 (14.9 Kb)

[root@localhost root]# iwconfig eth1
eth1 no wireless extensions.


Orinoco seems to be the new driver in use.
Notice that eth1 still has no wireless connection and it does not exist as a device.

I tried starting eth1 under Network monitor but it failed to start. An this is new... eth0 seems to actually have some activity occuring on the activity monitor. This did not happen before. That must be a good sign.

I was assuming that because this was a dell that you would have configured the onboard ethernet. That eth0 appearing there is onboard ethernet right?

Also, try ifconfig wlan0 or wvlan0, maybe RH used the old device notation, but I doubt it. To find out for certain, what do you get from: "dmesg"

Cheers,

Finegan

This is Definitely good. It seems that eth0 recognizes the card as linksys and seems to be aware of the wirless signal and link.
But still am not able to connect to the network or internet for some reason.



[root@localhost root]# iwconfig
lo no wireless extension

eth0 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID: "linksys" Nickname: "Prism I"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437GHz Access Point: 00:04:5A:D1:84:C3
Bit Rate: 11Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm Sensitivity:1/3
Retry min limit: 8 RTS thr:off Fragment Thr: off
Power Managment: Off
Link Quality: 15/92 Signal Level: -87 dBm Noise Level:-102 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 invalid crypt:0 invalid misc:0

Brilliant,

well, if your router is running dhcp, try:

dhcpcd eth0

If it isn't you can edit some stuff quickly by hand:

route add default gw xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Where the X's are the IP address of the router. Then you have to add the IP's of your nameservers into /etc/resolv.conf in the format:

nameserver 111.222.333.444
nameserver 111.222.333.444

Luck,

Finegan

ifconfig wlan0 or wvlan0 both result in:

error fetching interface information: Device not found


and dmsg gives me a lot of garbage:

[root@localhost root]# dmesg
r Linux NET4.0
Linux Kernel Card Services 3.1.22
options: [pci] [cardbus] [pm]
PCI: Found IRQ 11 for device 00:04.0
PCI: Sharing IRQ 11 with 01:00.0
PCI: Found IRQ 11 for device 00:04.1
PCI: Sharing IRQ 11 with 00:03.0
Yenta IRQ list 0690, PCI irq11
Socket status: 30000006
Yenta IRQ list 0690, PCI irq11
Socket status: 30000010
cs: IO port probe 0x0c00-0x0cff: clean.
cs: IO port probe 0x0100-0x04ff: excluding 0x130-0x137 0x378-0x37f 0x4d0-0x4d7
cs: IO port probe 0x0a00-0x0aff: clean.
cs: memory probe 0xa0000000-0xa0ffffff: clean.
hermes.c: 12 Dec 2000 David Gibson <hermes@gibson.dropbear.id.au>
orinoco.c 0.06c (David Gibson <hermes@gibson.dropbear.id.au> and others)
dldwd: David's Less Dodgy WaveLAN/IEEE Driver
orinoco_cs.c 0.06 (David Gibson <hermes@gibson.dropbear.id.au> and others)
eth0: Firmware ID 1F vendor 0x3 (Samsung) version 0.08
eth0: Ad-hoc demo mode supported.
eth0: MAC address 00:03:2F:00:C1:A3
eth0: Station name "Prism I"
eth0: ready
eth0: index 0x01: Vcc 5.0, irq 9, io 0x0180-0x01bf
PCI: Found IRQ 5 for device 00:08.0
maestro: Configuring ESS Maestro 2 found at IO 0xF800 IRQ 5
maestro: subvendor id: 0x00851028
maestro: not attempting power management.
maestro: AC97 Codec detected: v: 0x41445303 caps: 0x400 pwr: 0xf
maestro: 1 channels configured.
maestro: version 0.15 time 17:36:52 Sep 6 2001
end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00 (floppy), sector 19
attempt to access beyond end of device

etc.
etc.
etc.