Wireless - Orinoco Gold with RH 7.3

Hello All!

I am in need of some help with my Orinoco Gold Wireless Card running RH 7.3 (2.4.18-10) on my IBM T30 Laptop.

I am novice at best in the Linux world, but I am venturing out of Windows (Ya). I have had no, and I mean no success installing the card. Getting everything to compile correctly has been a pain, I worked on it all weekend and no success. I have read many posts and articles, and I get to the same point were I begun.

Can anyone walk me through, or point me to an article that will help me install this from Start to Finish. I would greatly appreciate it.

Best Regards,
Grant

The orinoco series card is just about, but not quite, the best supported card under linux. With RH 7.3 you shouldn't have had to compile anything... if you've compiled a lot, or changed a lot of configuration files, you might want to start over with a fresh install.

To start with, when you insert the card, does the machine make 2 high pitched beeps? If so, it should have loaded the proper modules for your card, which should be listed under the command:

/sbin/lsmod

hermes
orinoco
orinoco_cs

If they don't appear, post back with the output of "lsmod" as well as the last 10 or so lines of output from the command "dmesg", but only from right after the insertion of the card.

Now, if those modules are loaded, assuming you have onboard ethernet and its configured, then the wireless card should be assigned eth1. As root:

ifconfig eth1 up
iwconfig eth1 essid NAMEOFWIRELESSNETWORK
iwconfig eth1 enc 1234567890 (the key, if you are using WEP)
iwconfig eth1 rate auto

Now, how do you get your IP address from a router? dhcp? or static?

if its dhcp:

dhcpcd eth1

If its static:

ifconfig eth1 192.168.1.100 up
route add default gw 192.168.1.1
echo "nameserver 200.200.200.200" > /etc/resolv.conf

(this is an example where the router's IP address is 192.168.1.1, and your ISP's nameserver is 200.200.200.200 for DNS resolution).

Post back if that works, or at least how far you get, and we'll sort out the rest ? show you how to automate it for boot.

Cheers,

Finegan

Everything worked great up until I enabled DHCP, when I enabled it, the card turned off. I tried to manually configure a static ip, but i was unable to setup my default gateway. In both of these situations, there was no activity from my card. Just as an FYI, I have wireless working on my other computers, but there are on XP. So I know the Access Point is configured correctly.

When i run iwconfig eth1, there is a warning that says 'Device eth1 has been complied with Version 13 of Wireless Extension, while we are using version 12. Some things may be broken.'

Attached is the dmesg commnad.

hermes.c: 5 Apr 2002 David Gibson
<hermes@gibson.dropbear.id.au>
orinoco.c 0.11b (David Gibson
<hermes@gibson.dropbear.id.au> and others)
orinoco_cs.c 0.11b (David Gibson
<hermes@gibson.dropbear.id.au> and others)
eth1: Station identity 001f:0001:0007:001c
eth1: Looks like a Lucent/Agere firmware version 7.28
eth1: Ad-hoc demo mode supported
eth1: IEEE standard IBSS ad-hoc mode supported
eth1: WEP supported, 104-bit key
eth1: MAC address 00:02:2D:4C:90:51
eth1: Station name "HERMES I"
eth1: ready
eth1: index 0x01: Vcc 5.0, irq 3, io 0x0100-0x013f
Linux agpgart interface v0.99 (c) Jeff Hartmann
agpgart: Maximum main memory to use for agp memory:
203M
agpgart: Detected Intel i845 chipset
agpgart: AGP aperture is 64M @ 0xe0000000
[drm] AGP 0.99 on Unknown @ 0xe0000000 64MB
[drm] Initialized radeon 1.1.1 20010405 on minor 0
Intel 810 + AC97 Audio, version 0.21, 11:58:19 Aug 7
2002
PCI: Found IRQ 11 for device 00:1f.5
PCI: Sharing IRQ 11 with 00:1f.3
PCI: Sharing IRQ 11 with 00:1f.6
PCI: Sharing IRQ 11 with 02:00.1
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 00:1f.5 to 64
i810: Intel ICH3 found at IO 0x18c0 and 0x1c00, IRQ 11
i810_audio: Audio Controller supports 6 channels.
ac97_codec: AC97 Audio codec, id: 0x4144:0x5348
(Analog Devices AD1881A)
i810_audio: AC'97 codec 0 Unable to map surround DAC's
(or DAC's not present), t
otal channels = 2
ac97_codec: AC97 Modem codec, id: 0x5349:0x4c27
(Unknown)
i810_audio: timed out waiting for codec 1 analog
ready.


What should I do now?

Grant

That interesting... that RedHat shipped a version of wireless_tools one behind the extensions from their running kernel... RedHat usually does a pretty slipshod job of configuring things for pcmcia anyway. Usually though, that doesn't mean anything. Offhand, I don't think any machine I have has a matching version of both.... but that's my doing.

When trying to get the device to use dhcp, did you configure through a script (which may envoke any number of dhcp clients... pump being particularly bad with wireless), or manually invoke "dhcpcd".

If you're using one of those generic out-of-the box Linksys/Belkin/Dlink Wireless routers, all of them are configured to forward regardless of whether they're forwarding for a dhcp leased client or a statically configured.

Using the commands above for configuring with a static IP, what went wrong? Also, when you say the card shuts off... do errors appear in dmesg? Or does it blink like a maniac for a long time (60seconds, 120sec) and then just give up. If so that's a normal dhcp timeout, probably a case of not having one of the wireless settings right... WEP key for instance?

Cheers,

Finegan

When I enabled DHCP, the card did flicker for about 120 seconds, then the power light turned off.

As for the Static Configuration, it errors when i add the default gateway. The error says "SIOCADDRT: File Exists"

Does it matter if Wireless Drivers are outdated?

I am using a POS linksys router/wireless gateway. However, it does not appear to have any configurable DCHP settings about Broadcasting. I just purchased the Linksys, should i send it back and get a new one? Maybe an Agere Orinoco RG-1100? What do you think?

As for WEP, I have not enabled it because I wanted to get it working first. Then I was going to enable WEP.

What are your thoughts?

I've gotten these cards, actually, the cheaper version of these cards, to work with those routers just fine. Check the output of iwconfig, by default I think the card is initialized using WEP. To kill it may be as easy as "iwconfig eth1 enc off". I'm pretty certain its just a matter of the right wireless settings, the driver looks right, the mis-match in extensions is not a big deal, what's the output of "iwconfig eth1"? That is, after using "ifconfig eth1 up"... depending on card, sometimes iwconfig doesn't report right unless the device is technically "on".

Cheers,

Finegan

Here are the files and additional ones that you will need. Still having the same problems. The only difference now is that when i disabled encyrption, the light does not blink for the 120 secs, it does not do anything. Then the card shuts down. Could the problem due to the frequency rate?

As for trying to configure it statically, when I add the DG, it says SIOCADDRT: File exists (Same error as before)

[root@localhost root]# iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

[root@localhost root]# iwconfig eth1
Warning : Device eth1 has been compiled with version 13
of Wireless Extension, while we are using version 12.
Some things may be broken...

eth1 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"DontFwMe" Nickname:"localhost.localdomain"
Mode:Ad-Hoc Frequency:2.442GHz Cell: 00:06:25:60:6B:63
Bit Rate:11Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm Sensitivity:1/3
Retry limit:4 RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Encryption key:7365-6375-31
Power Managementff
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
--------------------------------------------------------------------------.
[root@localhost root]# ifconfig
lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:66 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:66 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:4632 (4.5 Kb) TX bytes:4632 (4.5 Kb)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[root@localhost root]# ifconfig eth1
eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:02:2D:4C:90:51
BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:8 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:5152 (5.0 Kb)
Interrupt:3 Base address:0x100
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Same Commands, but wanted to show that encryption was disabled

[root@localhost root]# iwconfig eth1 enc off
[root@localhost root]# iwconfig eth1
Warning : Device eth1 has been compiled with version 13
of Wireless Extension, while we are using version 12.
Some things may be broken...

eth1 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"DontFwMe" Nickname:"localhost.localdomain"
Mode:Ad-Hoc Frequency:2.442GHz Cell: 00:06:25:60:6B:63
Bit Rate:2Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm Sensitivity:1/3
Retry limit:4 RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Encryption key:7365-6375-31
Power Managementff
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0


Not sure what to do, what do you think?

Okay, there was an encrypt bug in the orinoco drivers a while back that I saw had been sorted for silver and bronze cards (the bronze cards are also known as the roamabout DS). An iwconfig command to shut off encryption was ignored... Encryption with the "Lucent default key" that is set up on initialization sticks regardless of what you tell it. See how you have the same key loaded above in both instances...

The solution is of course to change the default configuration info... heck you can set the default essid, rate, blah blah blah through this and preset them to talk.

edit /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts

and comment out the KEY="s:secu1" line.

Then hard restart pcmcia with "/etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia restart"

Hopefully that's the bug...

Cheers,

Finegan

Mr. Finegan

You are a Linux Wiz. Everything is up and running. Thanks for all of the help! Is there anyone to enable the card upon bootup? Once again, thanks for the help!

GB

Reading this thread has been helpful to me also. Finegan is quite the genius! I am not so much of a linux wiz, but I do know that if you create /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 with the parameters you desire, and set ONBOOT='yes', this will get you half way there. The only problem is, by default, network starts before pcmcia on boot up, so if your wireless card needs to get dhcp, it will not be able to. Does anyone know how the manipulate the boot order from the command line (non-graphical). Thanks.

-Tom

There is no problem with startup. It doesn't matter that pcmcia starts after. I just tried it. Just add ifcfg-eth1 and your good to go!

-Tom