Lost wifi - FC6 - RT2500
 

My wifi has stopped working and I could do with some pointers as to where to start troubleshooting.

I'm running FC6 (2.6.19-1.2911-fc) with a Ralink RT2500 pci wifi card. It's all been working fine for months since I install the wifi drivers (RT2500-Linux-STA-1.4.6.6), but I switched the machine on last night and it says that it can't find an IP address.

Nothing on the network has changed, my router is still set up the same and my XP laptop still connects just the same as normal.

I've not installed anything new on the FC6 machine or changed the network settings, it's just decided that it doesn't want to play any more :cry:

I know there should be log files and stuff that I can check to see what went wrong, but I don't know which ones to look for or where to find them.

How can I tell if the card is actually working. One of the status lights flashes on during power up, but then it immediately goes off again and after that there are no visible signs that the card is working.

Could anyone give me any pointers please?

Thanks,

Richard.

Hya,

Look for dmesg, syslog. Check how ifconfig, iwconfig and wlanconfig looks like.

Good luck.

OK, thanks for the pointers.

dmesg doesn't seem to give me anything useful, but then again I'm not sure if there's anything specific to look for.

I tried;

dmesg | grep wlan0

That returned nothing, so I tried

dmesg | grep RT2500

and got;

rt2500 1.1.0 CVS CVS http:rt2x00.serialmonkey.com
rt2500 EEPROM: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Channel
rt2500 EEPROM: 6 6 6 6 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 dBm Maximum

I'm not quite sure what that tells me though.

I did;

ifconfig wlan0

and got;

Link encap: Ethernet HWaddr 00:08:A1:8D:2E;EA
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:40096 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:2255840 (2.1 MiB)
Interrupt:19 Base address:0x4000

Which implies that the card is instlled and running. Particularly as when I issue the command again, the number of TX packets keeps on increasing.

When I try;

iwconig wlan0

I get;

RT2500 Wirless ESSID:"" Nickname:"HOM03"
Mode:Managed Frequency=2.412 GHz Bit Rate=11 Mb/s Tx-Power:-1 dBm
RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:xxxx-xxxx-xxxx Security mode:open
Link Quality=0/100 Signal level=-120 dBm Noise level:-201 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

The interesting thing is that the ESSID is empty where I would normally expect it to say "homenet".

I've tried doing;

iwconfig essid homenet

But when I check it again afterwards, it's always back to an empty string value again.

If I try;

wlanconfig

I get a "command not found" error.

I'm not sure where to find "syslog".

So it would seem that some of the network settings are missing or corrupt.

Where do I find the config file that stores this info so that I can check it directly? Is there such a file as wlan0.cfg or similar where these settings are stored?

Thanks,

Richard.

I've had a further play and discovered that if I type;

iwlist wlano scanning

I get info returned about my available network, including signal strength, so that must mean that the adapter is working in order for it to pick up the info.

So the problem must be with the configuration file if I can just find out where it is.

I've tried changing the settings in WifiRadar to fixed IP, but then when I click the "connect" button, it does nothing, not even an error message or info box. So I've switched back to DHCP and then just keep getting the "Failed to get IP address" message.

Any help would be good round about now, as I'm pretty stuck.

Thanks,

Richard.

Hi,

I thought it would have been hardware or driver problem, but..

1. Find your interface. Is it ra0?
2. When you set essid, you have to specify interface. and see what happens.
3. I would say, the easiest way to restore the broken files is "install again"

Happy Penguins!

The interface id is wlan0.

I'm not at home at the moment so I can't test until later, but I'll try;

iwconfig wlan0 essid homenet

and see what happens. Though, having tried setting it through WiFiRadar and it failed to store it there, I'm thinking that your last option is probably the way to go.

Do I need to uninstall the current driver first or can I just install over it?

If I need to uninstall, how do I do that? When I compiled the driver is it common practice for it to also make an uninstall script as well as the install one?

Thanks for the help,

Richard.