Hi there,

I have an intersil prism2 wireless B pcmcia card and I have been trying to get it to work now for a few days. I am using FC5 2.6.15-2054. When I plug in the card it lists it as INTERSIL HFA384x/IEEE in the network configuration gui. So I go to create a new interface and select that card as wireless and set it up with static ip, no wep, my essid. I put in my DNS servers and OK to save and exit. I then restart the network and do ifconfig:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0D:56:XX:XX:XX
inet addr:10.0.0.3 Bcast:10.0.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::20d:56ff:XXXX:XXXX/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:2187 errors:6 dropped:6 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:2073 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:2378565 (2.2 MiB) TX bytes:305211 (298.0 KiB)
Interrupt:7

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:7184 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:7184 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:8948868 (8.5 MiB) TX bytes:8948868 (8.5 MiB)

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:02:6F:XX:XX:XX
inet addr:10.0.0.8 Bcast:10.0.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:1343 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:6 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:105464 (102.9 KiB) TX bytes:576 (576.0 b)
Interrupt:3 Base address:0xd100





I then do iwconfig:

lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

wifi0 IEEE 802.11b ESSID:"myessid" Nickname:"laptop"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.447 GHz Access Point: None
Bit Rate=2 Mb/s Sensitivity=1/3
Retry min limit:8 RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Encryption keyff
Power Managementff

wlan0 IEEE 802.11b ESSID:"myessid" Nickname:"laptop"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.447 GHz Access Point: None
Bit Rate=2 Mb/s Sensitivity=1/3
Retry min limit:8 RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Encryption keyff
Power Managementff
Link Quality=52/70 Signal level=-41 dBm Noise level=-94 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:6 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:74 Invalid misc:2676 Missed beacon:0

sit0 no wireless extensions.



I do iwlist scan:

lo Interface doesn't support scanning.

eth0 Interface doesn't support scanning.

wifi0 Scan completed :
Cell 01 - Address: 00:12:17:XX:XX:XX
ESSID:"myessid"
Mode:Master
Frequency:2.447 GHz (Channel 8)
Signal level=-43 dBm Noise level=-95 dBm
Encryption keyff
Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s
24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
Extra:bcn_int=100
Extra:resp_rate=10

wlan0 Scan completed :
Cell 01 - Address: 00:12:17:XX:XX:XX
ESSID:"myessid"
Mode:Master
Frequency:2.447 GHz (Channel 8)
Signal level=-61 dBm Noise level=-95 dBm
Encryption keyff
Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s
24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
Extra:bcn_int=100
Extra:resp_rate=10

sit0 Interface doesn't support scanning.




I still cannot connect. I installed "Wireless Assistant" and tried to use it to connect to my AP, (which BTW is the ONLY one I see even though I live in an extremely dense neighborhood with about 15-20 APs around me.) I am able to connect to my AP using wireless assistant and am able to ping my router but not any of the other machines on the network nor anything beyond my router. I am not able to login to my router config through the wireless either. I had previously been using mandriva and when i installed this card it only made one interface entry "wlan0" not "wifi0" as well. What is that about? the card works just fine on a friends wonderous windows machine. I know I am missing something. I put it into monitor mode with iwconfig wlan0 mode monitor and sniff away with kismet and ethereal/wireshark just fine. But no access to my own AP.

Thanks for any help.

Open a console and type either or and then put your root password in when prompted. You may also need to disable your wired network card.

Post back the results.

I get:

wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
Listening on LPF/wlan0/00:02:6f:XX:XX:XX
Sending on LPF/wlan0/00:02:6f:XX:XX:XX
Sending on Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 5
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 16
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 16
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 10
No DHCPOFFERS received.
No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.

it seems like wifi0 and wlan0 are competing... can you try (as root)

ifdown wlan0

and try to connect again?

when I ifdown wifi0 wlan0 goes down also. and the same is true for wlan0, wifi0 goes down. I don't understand why there are two interfaces. Some googling as yielded that wifi0 is a "dumb" interface and that all my commands should be on wlan0. But I can't seem to get it to work.

I tried... just being curious, what distro?

the eth0 and the wlan0 are both on the same subnet: 10.0.0.#. I'm running SuSE10 and i could reach the outside, but not the internal network when my eth0 and wlan0 were on the same subnet... try:

ifdown eth0

and see if it works. I hardly ever use the eth0, so i was happy just disabling it. I don't know what you would have to do to allow both to work...

What do you get with `route -n` ?

route -n gives me:

Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
192.168.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
192.168.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 wlan0
169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
127.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo
0.0.0.0 192.168.0.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 wlan0

Your gateway seems to be on a different subnet than from your IP address.

Try setting your wlan IP address to the same subnet.

I'm using FC5 2.6.15


When I do 'arp' it comes back with another system on my network, not my gateway. That's a problem.. When I try to fix it the changes wont stick so I rebooted all the machines including the router and it still comes up that my other pc is the arp server...I checked another machine that's on my network and it shows that not only is my gateway the arp server but so are 4 other machines...it sends arp requests to all the machines on the network instead of just the gateway/router. That seems to me to be a security problem, but, hey, it works for now for just that machine. But my wireless wont accept any changes...thus, not connectivity.

Have you checked to see if the module(s) for the Prism cards have been loaded? From what I've seen, read & heard, most of the 2.6.x kernels don't have all the modules compiled in them. In some distros (Debian) they come as an extra & have to be added to the kernel tree.

should show the loaded modules.

I believe that there are some distros like Landros & the newest Ubuntu that have all these modules already added. Wireless support is still in its infancy regarding Linux and is therefore somewhat patchy.

the modules are loaded at startup. I do lsmod | orinoco_cs and they come up just fine. Actually I have been able to connect *sometimes.* This is pretty frustrating. there are a few wifi networks that I frequent and it seems that I am unable to switch between them very well. it takes forever to get my card to connect to a network. I go to a few coffee shops and sit there for an hour just trying to get my card to associate and the same is true at home and at work. My network at home uses static ips and wep, work uses dhcp and wep and all the coffee shops are dhcp no wep. Why is it such a pain to switch between them? If I am at home and connected to my network, then shutdown and go to the cafe when I boot up everything gets loaded fine but it takes a heck of a lot of ifup ifdown ifconfig iwconfig yadayada to finally get it to *see* the network and associate. I must be doing something wrong. Is there a specific config file that I should be keeping all this info in so that I don't have to start fresh each time? Thanks.

Do you have the KDE utility, "KwiFi Manager"? I believe that in its config mode it gives you 4 different choices to pick from to load your network(s). So, you can record the different details in each config profile and switch to the appropriate profile.

I have tried several gui wifi managers but all seem to be kinda flaky in some way or another. I have no prob running these commands myself but I just want know if there is a way that I can set it to automatically associate and tweak my settings to be appropriate for whatever network I want. I read in another post that wpa_supplicant can store 'profiles' about my different networks. I might give that a try and see if I get anywhere with it. I'm going to look into writing some of my own scripts for connecting to my networks. I was hoping that there would be an end-all fix-all solution but probably not yet anyway.