I am running Manriva 2006 on a Toshiba M55 Satellite. I have a built in wireless card with Atheros chipset. At home, I have a Linksys WRT55 wireless router. The router is set for DHCP.

Now everything used to work great. Then I had to reinstall Mandriva and now I have an odd problem. I cannot get the required info from DHCP. iwconfig will show a good connection to the AP but ifconfig will have no IP information. If I switch to a static setting, all works fine. But since I need DHCP to connect at other locations it is inconvenient to reconfigure static every time I come home.

Here are some "facts" that when taken together confuse the heck out of me as to how/where to troubleshoot this problem.

1. laptop works fine with DHCP everywhere but on my home router
2. On the home router, every other wired box on the network works fine with DHCP
3. everything works just fine when I boot the laptop into Windows.

So from all this I conclude
1. That the problem is not on the router end since all other computers on network and even the laptop on Windows work fine.
2. The problem is not with the dhcp client on my linux laptop since I can connect just fine to other networks
3. The problem is not with my hardware configuration since everything works fine on every other network and even on my home network if I go static.

Well, after forming those conclusions I am left with no idea where to look. So any ideas on where I am wrong in my conclusions or what else I can look for would be greatly appreciated.

Are you using encryption, (needs to match on both ends) and have you checked the SSID ( should match the SSID on your router) on Mandirva?

One possibility is that you might be having some problems with the interaction between your laptop DHCP agent with the specific DHCP server from your router.

I would suggest that you (temporarily) change your wireless interface to a static address within the range that your wireless router is servicing (and manually set your gateway address, and DNS servers) to see if you can successfully communicate with both your network and the outside world.

Happy Hunting!