I'm having troubles connecting to my wireless network consistently. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I am using a Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop. I have a few newbie questions:

1. When I run iwconfig, I usually see that my eth1 connection is linked to my wireless router. Sometimes I see the nickname=linux (Don't know how to change the nickname of my computer). Sometimes I will get the nickname=Hermes I. What is this???

2. I can usually ping my router and get replies, but sometimes even when I get replies to the ping I cannot connect. Why is this???

3. When I type a command in called route, it shows some network information. When I am able to connect to the internet I have a default gateway listed as 192.168.0.1. This line is not there when I am unable to connect. I'm not sure what this means because when I set a default gateway in YaST, it totally screws up my network configuration ( I see this when I run iwconfig and things have changed).

Anyway, these are a few of the questions I have to start with. I would eventually like to be able to connect to the web every time I start up. I am at work right now so I can't post any command line results.

Any help would be appreciated!!!!

Luke

I have the exact same machine, what wireless card do you have?

When you have do not see your default gateway you cannot connect. This is probably because your network is down. Use a browser and enter
http://192.160.0.1 you should get the setup of your router -assuming you enter your username and password- and if you don't have to, shame.

This is assuming you have the router on the same address check the settings in your manual if you are unfamiliar.

You should find under adsl or ppp or config a line saying disconnected click on the change button on this page and it should reconnect after 20 secs approx.
(Most use the connexant wireless router chipset described here, or something similar.)
You will now have to reboot your laptop to get the dns entries from your ip etc.

The problem if this sorts everything is that your ip provider is dropping your connection and is not hot wiring the connections. Some ip providers
if they do maintenance drop all connections and your router has to re logon, other ip's do hot wiring remembering the connections and reconnect after maintenance.

I get round this with rebooting my router. If your on holiday -and you need to connect to your machine, or hosting websites- this is solved by having a timer
disconnecting once a day to at least ensure reconnection with the ip.

Thanks for the replies.

I don't the reason for no gateway is because the network is down. The reason is because my windows machine always connects. When I try to connect to the router by typing in 192.168.0.1 using my linux machine, I usually always get a Connection Not Allowed or something similar.


My wireless card is a Dell TrueMobile 1150 Series PC Card. I have not used the ndiswrapper to set it up, YaST seemed to configure it normally. Could this be the problem?