Hi all,

I've been trying to get my girlfriend's laptop set up with Mandrake, and so far the only stumbling block has been getting her wireless card working. She has a linksys WPC54G v.1.2. Everything seems like it should be working; iwconfig and ifconfig are both fine, wlan0 starts successfully at boot, the ESSID shows as "linksys", but...I can't connect to any webpages. Here's the ifcfg-wlan0 file:

MODE=Managed
DEVICE=wlan0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
ipaddr=(This shows up as normal)
NETMASK=
NETWORK=
BROADCAST=
ONBOOT=yes
hwaddr=(This shows up as a bunch of letters and numbers, I assume that's normal too)
MII_NOT_SUPPORTED=no
WIRELESS_ENC_KEY=""

Does anyone have any experience setting up this particular card with Mandrake 10? I've been working on this for days, and I'm starting to get extremely frustrated...

Thanks in advance if you can help!

I assume this means that you've only tested your internet connection with a web browser (like Firefox, Konqueror, etc). Try to ping your local host first ("ping 127.0.0.1"), then try to ping something outside like google ("ping www.google.com").

Are you using dhcp (which it looks like you are)? If so, does the IP address for wlan0 reported by ifconfig look correcty (you mentioned that "iwconfig and ifconfig are both fine", but I just wanted to make sure). In fact, go ahead and post the output of iwconfig and ifconfig if its not too hard.

How did you install the wireless card; did you do it via ndiswrapper? If so, also post the output of ndiswrapper -l.

~Justin

I actually have tried pinging. 127.0.0.1 returns packages at a rate of less than 1 ms. Pinging an outside address like google returns 'unknown host'.

iwconfig:

lo no wireless extensions

eth0 no wireless extensions

wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID: "linksys" Nickname: "amb"
Mode: Managed Frequency: 2.437GHz
Access Point: 00:0F:66:97:2F:6C
Bit Rate=54Mb/s Tx-Power: 25 dBm
RTS thr=2347B Fragment thr=234 dBm
Encryption key: off
Power management: off
Link Quality:100/100 Signal level: -69 dBm Noise level: -256dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt: 0 Rx invalid frag: 0
Tx excessive retries: 0 Invalid misc: 0 Missed beacon: 0

ifconfig:

Link encap: Local Loopback
inet addr: 127.0.0.1 Mask: 255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU: 16436 Metric:1
RX packets: 150 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets: 150 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
Collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes: 10928 (10.6Kb) TX bytes: 10928(10.6Kb)

wlan0 Link encap: Ethernet HWaddr 00:0F:66:58:85:49
inet addr: xxx.168.1.yyy Bcast: xxx.168.1.zzz Mask: 255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTITASK MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets: 894 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets: 1 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 Collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes: 59735 (58.3Kb) TX bytes:342 (342.0b)
Interrupt: 11 Memory:10400000-10401fff

ndiswrapper -l:

Installed drivers:

lsbcmnds Hardware present

I didn't include the complete IP addresses for security reasons, but I used different letters to indicate different series of numbers, in case that's important.

If you can offer any insight, that would be awesome.

I had the same card and have had (frequently) the same problem. My prob specifically was that I didn't want to use dhcp so I could better configure my firewall rules with static ips. Everytime I rebooted I lost my dns servers and had to put them back in. I don't know if that might be your prob. If it's just sites like google you can't ping then that might be the case, try pinging your router. 192.168.1.1 is usually the dhcp default or whatever you set. If that shows no route to host then you have other probs. Anyway, double check your dns servers in MCC>Network And Internet>Alter Miscellaneous Internet Settings. You'll usually have 2 ips plus a search domain if you've got dhcp set to foreward it to you.

I've had a similar problem after installing Slackware 10.2.

The pcmcia wireless card is detected, but I don't get an IP address & so can't connect to the internet and couldn't ping the router.

My solution so far is to type /sbin/dhcpcd ra0 after booting up & that gives me an ip address and web access, all I need to do now is run that command on bootup after the pcmcia card is detected.

Your ifconfig looks as though you're getting an ip address so presumably a different problem to mine.

another issue might be your arp cache, but that would be specific to what you've got down as your gateway. Although it's unlikely, you might have been poisened by a rogue wardriver idiot or something if you haven't got any security setup. Just type arp as root on the command line and it should come back with the IP/hostname of your router. In my experience most people who try this method of sniffing aren't smart enough to actually foreward your traffic to the legit site so you just timeout on every search. Like I said, it's unlikely but worth a check.