Turning on wireless card
 

I'm trying to get wireless to work on my laptop. I'm using a SMC 2635 card and have the drivers installed as well as the wireless tools. I've gotten stuck getting the card to access the router. I can't get an IP assigned to it or anything. It seems as if the radio is not even on. Can anyone give me any pointers?


Thinkpad T22
SMC 2635
RH 9.0

Might I ask where you got drivers for this card? I picked one up for $20 and would love to get it working under RedHat 9 on my laptop instead of always booting into XP when away from home.

Yup, I got them here:

http://www.admtek.com.tw/download/ADM8211.htm

Maybe you'll have better luck than me.

If you're positive that your card is an admtek, then be of good cheer. It works w/linux. Could you post the output of these 2 commands, run as root:
ifconfig -a
iwconfig

It shouldn't take too long to determine what's necessary to get the card functional

EDIT:
in the meantime, you can have a look at this little howto I put together for my dwl-650v2, which is an admtek card, I have not yet updated it, but the instructions for mandrake will work for redhat. Here's the link:
http://www.houseofcraig.net/belkin_howto.php

hit the "I've got the dwl-650" link near the top for admtek cards.

ifconfig -a :

iwconfig

I can't seem to pickup my ssid or anything. For whatever reason i can't assign it a channel either. Any ideas?

the card looks to be functional, looks like you might need to check the router's setup, especially regarding MAC address filtering and WEP. I've seen this more than a few times and more than once people had their routers set to either no wireless function on at all, not broadcasting essid (I have to broadcast the ssid to connect using this chipset), 128bit WEP keys as opposed to 64bit and/or to not allow their card to connect based on it's MAC address, so please check your router, while you're there verify it's ip address also because the ip address assigned to eth1 looks to be non-standard, if your router's ip is 192.168.1.1, try using ifconfig eth1 192.168.1.100 and then go with iwconfig eth1 mode managed rate 11M key off essid ssidnameofyourrouter.

Are the lights on the card doing anything?

EDIT: just noticed your bit-rate was 0.

I checked the router setup and everything is good. All my other wireless machines here work fine.

My router's ip is 192.168.254.254 .... I don't understand why the Bcast was showing up as 192.168.254.255 though. I tried using the iwconfig parameters you suggested to no avail.

The light on the card starts to blink once i do an ifconfig xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx to it.

Looks like i'm just going to have to wait for my Orinoco card to show up.

x.x.x.255 is the standard broadcast address. I just stuck my admtek card (dwl-650v2) in and got the same look on an iwconfig until I assigned an ip address via ifconfig, then the "link" light blinks incessantly until I go out of range (maybe that's the purpose of the incessant blink). Then I issued (as root) iwconfig eth1 mode managed rate 11M channel 4 essid wireless_hoc key 7988ADFECF. Then a ping <router's ip address> worked, are you issuing the correct iwconfig command for your site?

Any iwconfig parameters i try to set don't take affect. I try the same one you used, but with my values and nothing happens. I try individual ones like ... iwconfig eth1 essid name_of_ssid and it doesn't set the ssid for eth1. I can't figure what the heck I'm doing wrong here.

ok, made some progress here...

i changed the mode to ad-hoc and it picked up my network....i have the ssid, frequency, bit rate etc. now. Since ad-hoc mode is basically p2p mode, why can't it see the router in managed mode?

I'm using version 1.03 of the admtek driver, I have pre-compiled admtek modules available for redhat 9.0 and mandrake 9.0 on my howto page, if that makes any difference.

As far as ad-hoc v managed, are there any other wireless cards/access points within range that could explain this? Are you able to ping the router or another wireless card in ad-hoc?

The other thing that comes to mind theoretically is that you somehow managed to get the radio turned on where it was off before, this (I'm theorizing) happens occasionally with my acx100 card.

This time around I'm using the module from your site.

There is another wireless network setup at my neighbors house, but I can't pick it up unless I'm on the other side of the house. I'm not able to ping anything.

I agree with you about some how turning it on...its like once its in ad-hoc mode its "on", but managed mode it's "off". Hmmmm...

Try the module from my page, I'm using it right now w/redhat9, so, your neighbor hasn't secured their wireless network?, this is sad, and I see so much of it.

I am using the module from your page. Guess I'll just have to keep tinkering.

Nope, no security on my neighbors end. I agree it is sad to see things like this, but I've made a business out of it. I'll go wardriving in the neighborhood and find insecure networks and notify the person. I offer to fix their problem for a small fee. I figure I'm doing some good and creating a little revenue for myself.

Nice, very enterprising. So, still no go? Is there any difference at all in the behavior of the card now, or is it still the same?