base RH7.3 install on a dell latitude c840 (dual boot with w2k...)

i've gotten far enough into the install that i've managed to get my LinkSys "Instant Wireless Network PC Card (ISL37300P RevA)" recognized at boot time by putting the proper 'card' description in /etc/pcmcia/config , and describing ifcfg-eth1 to be the proper IP address for that card (reserving ifcfg-eth0 for the other normal ethernet port when connected).

but i get a message at the start:

'kp6 kernel: eth1: Channel out of range (0)!'

i tried setting a line in /etc/pcmcia/config.opts for module "orinoco_cs" to recognize a different channel, but that just produces a different message about a bad parm.

so ... i'm interested in what my "orinoco_cs" line in my config.opts should look like. and i'm also interested in making this wireless card work with my already established wireless network based in an Apple AirPort BaseStation, configured via macOS X's AirPort Admin Utility.

i've also seen other messages while surfing around in looking for an answer mentioning my wireless.opts file. i am not trying to administer the wireless network from my linux machine, but i want to confirm that there's nothing i need to do with that.

thanks in advance for any advice ...

I believe redhat uses it's own config scripts for bringing up wireless network devices, namely /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-wireless. As on mandrake, I think you'll find changes to your /etc/pcmcia/network.opts and /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts ineffectual.

You should be able to define all your wireless specific variables in the same ifcfg-eth1 file that you're defining ifconfig variables, take a look at the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-wireless script to see what their names are, then just define them in your ifcfg-eth1 file one per line similar to what's already there.

wireless.opts may have been the right place to put things, only that it wasn't choosing my card in the group of cases available.

i #commented out all lines except for the generic one at the end, and then stuffed in the values i wanted for ESSID, CHANNEL, RATE & KEY.

strangely, it still gives me the error message 'Channel out of range (0)!' . but that apparently something that can be ignored, because it's transporting packets. i did put CHANNEL in the ifcfg-eth0 as you suggested, but this doesn't make the error message go away.

unfortunately, it also seems to drop a lot of packets, to a point where it eventually seems to sort of hang the machine writing to /var/log/messages. if there are other parameters that might help cut down on this (different RATE, or other parameters as listed in wireless.opts), that would still be helpful for this problem.

Have you tried some of the various other iwconfig options (from the command line), to see the whole enchilada, type "man iwconfig" from the console. Out of the 4 different wireless cards here, none of them seem to drop packets, what kind of mesages are you getting in /var/log/messages?

i'll keep it in mind.

but after rebooting, i decided to do an up2date via my wired connection and make certain i had all the latest stuff that i could, then re-installed the vpn module.

i've been connected most of the day, now, and while the VPN connection has dropped one time (an experience that occurred occasionally even on the wired connection), i've not seen one of the messages about dropped frames in my /var/log/messages.

fyi, when they were occurring, the last of the messages were:

kernel: eth0: Unknown Rx error (0x3). Frame dropped.
kernel: eth0: Undecryptable frame on Rx. Frame dropped.
kernel: eth0: Undecryptable frame on Rx. Frame dropped.
kernel: eth0: Unknown Rx error (0x3). Frame dropped.
kernel: eth0: Undecryptable frame on Rx. Frame dropped.
kernel: eth0: Undecryptable frame on Rx. Frame dropped.
kernel: eth0: error -110 reading frame header. Frame dropped.
kernel: eth0: Error -110 writing packet header to BAP
last message repeated 22459 times
last message repeated 45408 times
<etc once per minute for a total of over 1.4 million messages in the span of about 35 minutes.>

anyway, i will check back if anything goes flaky. but for now, it seems good.

thanks everyone for your suggestions.