Hi all,
I am a newbee to linux but I have been able to install and load ndiswrapper for my wireless card with windows-xp drivers successfully (which makes me feel pretty good!!). However, I have run into a small problem. When I start firefox, it cannot get to the internet. I know my wireless card is working because I can do ifconfig and see it set up correctly. I can ping it from my router, etc. I am even able to vnc into my linux from a windows machine over the wlan0. It's just that firefox acts like it cannot see my network connection. If I have my ethernet cable plugged in, firefox works fine after a reboot.

The only thing I should perhaps mention is that after a reboot the wlan0 is not up and I have to load it manually. Don't know if that has anything to do with it. Last thing, I have 3 network cards, one internal, one ethernet pcmcia card, and the wireless pcmcia card.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

so it seems you have fine inside the network but are having problems getting outside.

Is your default gateway set to the ip of your wireless router? you can check this with the 'route' command. Also did you set a dhcp server? 216.109.112.135 is yahoos ip address, if yahoo loads from the ip but not from 'yahoo.com' then you are having dns problems.


Did you manually assign the address? something like 'pump -i eth0' should dhcp to the router and assign you a proper ip, gateway, and dns server.

It does not seem to be a DNS issue. I tried the yahoo ip address and got the same result. The gateway for wlan0 is set to 192.168.0.0 and the ip address of wlan is 192.168.0.105 (assigned using dhcp). I have set up the wireless card for DHCP using YaST gui. I have my firewall disabled. I think this all seems to be OK.

Now, I have set up my wireless configuration (ESSID, keys, ect.) using YaST network cards gui. But, I did all my ndiswrapper install/load via command line. I wonder if theres is a disconnect between the gui setup and the manual configs. Where is the config file for my network setting? I would like to set it up to load ndiswrapper on power up.

Thanks for the reply!

One more piece of information which might be useful. In YaST "Network Card Configuration Overview" I can see the mac address for my two ethernet cards, but for the wlan0 it simply says "wlan-bus-pcmcia" in place of the mac address, which is the same as the configuration name for the wlan under YaST. Again, I can vnc into my linux from a PC over the wireless connection, but just cannot browse the internet using firefox.

what does 'ping 192.168.0.0' return? are you sure the internal ip of the router is 0.0 and not 0.1 ( which is it is most cases ). paste the output of 'route' also.

you should be able to see in the wireless web config what its internal ip is and there should also be logging that you can watch to see if anything from your laptop is reaching the router.

tgo,
You are right. I gave bad information. Here is the route output as it gets set up by YaST.

Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
192.168.0.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 wlan0
192.168.9.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth1
link-local * 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 eth1
loopback * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo

With this route table I'm not able to ping 216.109.112.135. However, if I add 192.168.0.1 as the default gateway then I can ping 216.109.112.135 but I still cannot go to it as htpp://216.109.112.135. So, maybe it's a gateway/dns issue after all. What puzzles me is that the ethernet connection works fine with my router but not the wireless. The router/dns setup seems to be the same for both eth0 and wlan0. Maybe it's my router LAN and WAN setup differences causing the problem. At this point I really don't know. I know that both my wireless and ethernet connections work fine with my Windows machines.

Thanks for your replies! You've pointed me in the right direction. I'll keep working on it.

Regards!

Just in case someone runs into the same problem with SuSE Linux, here is how I finally solved it. There were two problems:

1) I had to add a default gateway (my router LAN IP address). This can be done using the command line:

route add default gw 192.168.0.1 dev wlan0

or better yet from YaST, network devices, network cards menu.


2) I had to add a DNS address to my setup. Again, this can be done by adding the following line to the /etc/rsolve.conf:

nameserver 192.168.0.1

or add it from YaST, network devices, network cards menu.

Of course, you have to substitute 192.168.0.1 with your own gateway address.

Thanks to all who replied to this post!