All,

I did some searches, but I couldn't figure out the situation I am in from the posts I read.

I have installed SuSE 9.0 on my laptop and am trying to get my pcmcia D-Link DWL-650 card to work. I am very, very close, but nogo.. Any help would be much appreciated.

Basically, the card was detected fine and is attaching to my network fine. I am using KWifiManager to examint the signal. I am getting an IP from DHCP just fine, but I cant ping anything at all. I can ping the IP adress the the card was assigned ok, but thats it.

I typed in "iwconfig" to see what the story is and it says that my WEP KEY=off! I am using WEP and I have entered the right key in the YaST Wireless Settings box for my wireless card. Somehow, the wep settings aren't ending up in the right place.

Any help? I am hoping that's the only problem, but I could be wrong and am open to suggestions. I am a relative noob, but I can make config file changes ok and type commands in if needed.

Thanks!

eludwig,

try adding the encryption key to your /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-xxxx file, where xxxx is the interface like wlan0. Here is my file:

BOOTPROTO='dhcp'
DHCLIENT_MODIFY_RESOLV_CONF='yes'
DHCLIENT_SET_DEFAULT_ROUTE='yes'
MTU=''
REMOTE_IPADDR=''
STARTMODE='onboot'
UNIQUE=''
WIRELESS_ESSID='mynetwork'
WIRELESS_KEY='YYYYYYYYYY'
WIRELESS_MODE='Managed'
WIRELESS_NICK=''
WIRELESS_NWID=''


Replace the YYYYYYYYYY with your actual Key value. Mine is not actually YYYYYYYYYY, but you get the idea.

Good luck!

gatorlaz,

Thanks for your help. Unfortunately, it did not solve the issue. The only way I could get it to work was to disable WEP. Not a good general solution, but I have to isolate the problem before I can fix it, I guess. The SuSE YaST seems to want to call my "wan0" interface by the name "iwlan-pcmcia". Somehow it must associate the settings with the wlan0 interface internally. This is the contents of my "ifcfg-wlan-pcmcia" file in /etc/sysconfig/network:

BOOTPROTO='dhcp'
DHCLIENT_SET_DOWN_LINK='yes'
DHCLIENT_MODIFY_RESOLV_CONF='yes'
DHCLIENT_SET_DEFAULT_ROUTE='yes'
MTU=''
REMOTE_IPADDR=''
STARTMODE='hotplug'
UNIQUE='K1pk.jrBDbmL7DWA'
WIRELESS_ESSID='mynetworkSSID'
WIRELESS_KEY=''
WIRELESS_MODE='Managed'
WIRELESS_NICK=''
WIRELESS_NWID=''

This is without WEP enabled. If I enable WEP and fill in the key in YaST, I get he same file except the key DOES have the right value, as in:

WIRELESS_KEY='XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XX'

So it does look like the key is ending up in the right file. However, doing an iwconfig shows:

linux:/home/eludwig # iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11-b ESSID:"scorpionhuron_F" Nickname:"mynetworkSSID"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437GHz Access Point: 00:40:05:DE:E4:02
Bit Rate:11Mb/s Tx-Power:2346 dBm
Retry min limit:8 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Link Quality:42/92 Signal level:-66 dBm Noise level:-100 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

sit0 no wireless extensions.

The "Encryption key:off" part always looks like this regardless of whether or not the key is defined in the "ifcfg-wlan-pcmcia" file.

Strange, huh? I wonder what's going on there.

eludwig,

sorry that didn't help . Have you tried using 64bit encryption instead of 128bit? Also, in YaST2, you could configure a new card and choose Wireless from the drop down menu, but don't click on PCMCIA or USB. This will allow you to add the card as wlan0 (I think), and perhaps things will work correctly. Anyway, post your results as I am also looking at getting one of these cards.

eludwig,

I thought of something else--> did you try to add the WEP key as a hex value? Add a 0x in front of the key value.

gator, Thanks for the suggestions. I am going to investigate this further during the week. I may not be able to seriously play with it til the weekend due to time considerations, but if I discover anything else, I will post back here. At least it is good to know that the card is basically supported.