"dhclient" paralyzes system
 

Hello,

After a bit of a struggle, I've gotten a driver to compile for an SMC2635 wireless card (same one for admtek 8211) on Mandrake 9.1. To get things going, here's what I do at the prompt:

-modprobe pcmcia_core
-modprobe yenta_socket
-modprobe ds

That much gets the green light on

-insmod 8211.o

That gets the card's driver initialized and the green light blinking.

When I run iwconfig, I can set the ESSID, key, channel etc. All of these settings are fine, and I can pick up my wireless router's MAC with no problems, but here's where the fuzz comes in. The only way I know of to get an IP address from the access point here in my home network is to type in "dhclient eth1" at the prompt.

Once I do that, everything starts to go all to heck on my system. I can't open any files, I can't bring up a new terminal window, and I can't even shut down sometimes. I have noticed, there are problems stopping "alas" (whatever that is) whenever I can shut down...BUT....

If I keep the same terminal window open that I typed "dhclient eth1" into, I can ping any site I want (like yahoo) or I can even run lynx and start to surf the web. So the connection is good, but something about "dhclient" isn't. If I click on mozilla or anything else, it acts like it's going to start, but doesn't.

Is there a bug with dhclient, is there a better way to get an ipaddress, or what? this is nuts.

Ok, so I didn't fix whatever the "dhclient" problem was, but I did do a workaround. I *think* the dhclient problem was something to do with my router constantly sending some information to my machine about ip leases, which caused dhclient to constantly fork new processes and eat up my memory, so that nothing else could run correctly (maybe the TTL was way too short in the device driver or somewhere else?) Don't take that as gospel, but, it's the best stab I have at it.

My workaround was to just manually configure a static ip address. In case anyone wants to know how I did that, here's how:

-first made sure card was working and configured (see original post)

-assigned my machine an available static ip address via "ifconfig". NOTE: make sure you're assigning one that your router will allow. My router allows the first 32 addresses on a particular subnet. ie. any address between x.x.y.1 and x.x.y.32 (netmask 255.255.0.0) would have worked so long as another machine on my network didn't already have it.

-added my router as the default gw since it's the only thing between me and the rest of the net with"route"

-specifically, all I did was:
#ifconfig eth1 x.x.1.3
#route add default gw x.x.0.1

-after that, I was able to ping machines both in my network and out of my network. use the man pages and your router's documentation for more information.

smc2635 under linux
 

How did you install the pcmcia card? I am trying
this under Gentoo linux with kernel 2.4.20 but I don't know
whether to use kernel pcmcia support or pcmcia-cs to get the
card working....

I tried both pcmcia supports and the green light goes on, but insmod 8211 gives me: init_module: no such device???

can you tell me how to get this card working?

thank you very much

falk

Here's my exact script to that I use to get the card working with comments (the best I know how to describe what each step does).

#! /bin/sh

#these first three lines get the green light on
modprobe pcmcia_core
modprobe yenta_socket
modprobe ds

#this line gets the green light blinking
#you have to successfully compile the driver from www.admtek.com
#for this to be successful

insmod /usr/local/bin/ADM8211/8211.o

#need a brief pause before trying to configure the card
sleep 3

#these are universal card settings by default
iwconfig eth1 channel 6 rate 11M

#thest are my personal settings for a DSL connection, but yours
#should be similar. I use a static IP. Never could get DHCP #working

iwconfig eth1 essid [insert your essid]
iwconfig eth1 key [insert your key]
sleep 1

ifconfig eth1 [insert your IP]
route add default gw [insert your default gw

#--------------------------------------------------------------------
once you have it to where you think it should work try pinging yoruself (127.0.0.1), trying pinging other machines in your network, try pinging your default gw, and finally, try pining sites outside your network.

Cheers,
MR

ok I get it to blink now....I had to switch to kernel 2.4.18 and the adm8211 1.03. Cool so far.

But when I try to set any of the iwconfig stuff, I does not change anything.
I tried reboot, but no help.

The only thing I can change is the nick in the managed mode and I can switch to ad-hoc mode, where the card finds some strange mac-id, which does not
belong to my router (maybe a neighbour with a wlan card?).

What kernel set up are you using?

after switching to kernel 2.4.22 and using the latest driver from adm (version 1.05) it worked......