Wireless DNS issues
 

Hi all,
Here is my problem. I am running suse 9.2 on an hp ze4650 laptop. I have installed ndiswrapper 1rc4 and the latest souce from the stable branch of the wpa_supplicant CVS tree. I can negotiate my WPA-PSK key with my access point, aquire an IP from my DHCP server, and ping every machine on my LAN. Now comes the tricky part. I cannot "see" anything outside of the 192.168.x.x address range. For instance, when I try to ping www.google.com or even 128.10.3.61 I recieve the message "Network is unreachable". I have a gateway at 192.168.0.1. All of the other linux and windows clients have no problems "seeing" the outside world. I even disabled the firewall in suse on my laptop. Here are some contents of my files

/etc/resolve.conf -> 192.168.0.1

Output of "route"

Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
192.168.0.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 wlan0
link-local * 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 wlan0
loopback * 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Todd

You have no default gate way set.
Fire up YaST and go to "Network Devices" open up "Network Card"
In the lower part you will be presented with the cards configured for your computer. Click "change..."
and then "edit" -> "Routing". Enter a default gateway at the top (should be 192.168.0.1)

Why a static default router, should that be assigned from DHCP?
 

OK, that got it. Thanks for the help, but now I have a related question. Shouldn't the DHCP client get the default router from the DHCP server? All of my other distros and windows clients seem to. What will happen when I move locations? For instance, when I'm on campus at Purdue, their default router is not 192.168.0.1. How will the client pick up the default router from the server?

Thanks,
Todd

The DHCP server should be sending the default gateway setting with it's response.
There can be 2 problems, either the server doesn't send the default GW, or your client doesn't use it.
How this is configured I don't know for sure.

It probly involves editing the files in /etc/sysconfig/network, either directly or via the YaST utility.

I know that my DHCP server is sending the gateway IP since all my other linux distros and my wireless card in windows get the gateway's IP. Does anyone know how to check that the gateway being automatically assigned on the client side?

Thanks,
Todd

Default Gateway with wireless from DHCP Suse 9.2
 

OK, I figured out the problem (I think).

In Suse 9.2 there is the file ifcg.template in /etc/sysconfig/network. If you open up the file you will see the setting "DHCLIENT_PRIMARY_DEVICE". If you read the documentation above it, it states that only the first dhcp client can modify routes. On my laptop eth0 starts before wlan0. Therefore, I set this option to yes, allowing both eth0 and wlan0 to modify the routes and DNS information. With this setting you must be careful to not use more than one network device at a time since this could cause unpredictable behavior. I then brought down eth0, and brought up wlan0 and voila! Now my default gateway is being set from the DHCP server. I also disabled eth0 starting on boot in YAST since I very rarely use it. Hopefully this post will benefit someone else in the future.

Nice to know.