<picky>RedHat 8.0 uses dhclient, not dhcp. So in your instructions, the dhcpcd line should be "dhclient ethX"
<picky/>

When I wrote that RH8.0 had existed for 6 days... I didn't bother installing it on my test/slapped-silly machine for a week or so... in the couple of dozen wireless threads since then I assure you I got it right.

Cheers,

Finegan

Yeah, im in a bit of a situation here. I have a compaq Armada 7800 Laptop with the MA401 wireless card, and i cant even get it to recognize the card in the start up of linux. Im using RedHat 8.0, and have tried the newest wlan drivers that correspond with my kernel. I only have that lan card in there at the moment, but am not able to get it to be recognized. Please help. btw, my MA401 is straight through PCMCIA rather than MA301 adapter, as you might know considering its a laptop,

When you say not recognized, do the drivers appear at all under lsmod? If so, its just some juggling with wlan-ng.opts, if they won't load at all... what's the output of /sbin/cardctl ident

With that we can see if their wlan-ng.conf file has an entry for your card's ident, and if not, we can add one.

Cheers

Finegan

I am fairly inexperienced with linux, so it may be hard for me to explain. I believe when im trying to say that it isnt recognized, i mean that linux itself doesnt recognize it as hardware. I think that i had read somewhere that there was a problem with this where it would check for new hardware before it powered up the PCMCIA cards. Then again, i am not sure. Thanks for your help. also, how would i go about checking for drivers under lsmod?

From the command line:

/sbin/lsmod

will show what modules are loaded, hopefully one of them is prism2_cs, if not, no biggie, we'll sort that out.

/sbin/cardctl ident

Is going to give us basically the card's label, which we can check to make certain that A) the card is what netgear sold it as (yes, this can change) B) there is a correspoding entry in /etc/pcmcia/config or in this case /etc/pcmcia/wlan-ng.conf that tells cardmgr what module to bind to it.

Cheers,

Finegan

alright, i just ran lsmod, and there was no prism2_cs, so i guess we need to sort this out. btw, thanks a lot for your help and quick response... Wait wait, i tried teh second thing you put there and it says its a NETGEAR MA401RA Wireless PC, which is good i guess. I just wonder why its not being recognized. It says its in slot 0, which is right, with some other stuff which i can write if need be.

Run /sbin/cardctl ident and compare that to the information in /etc/pcmcia/wlan-ng.conf

If it doesn't match anything in there, post back with what the ident read was.

If it does match anything in there, post back with the last 20 or so lines you get from the command: 'dmesg' from right after when you popped in the card.

Cheers,

Finegan

divert: allocating diver_blk for eth0
eth0: 3c574-tx (my other card which i dont have plugged in right now) Fast EtherLink at io 0x300, irq 9, hw_addr 00:10:4B:5f:37:2d.
ASIC rev 1, 64k FIF0 split 1:1 Rx:Tx, autoselect MII interface.
divert: freeing diver_blk for eth0
cdrom: This disc doesn't have any tracks I recognize!
(divert: not allocating divert_blk for non-ethernet device eth0
divert: no divert_blk to free, eth0 not ethernet) repeated 4 or 5 times.

Basically here, theres no real info about the correct card which im trying to configure, because i dont have my wired lan card plugged in anymore, Im gonna try restarting my laptop and running that test again making sure i dont plug in teh wired card at all. I have done this and still similar results

hey guys, ill be back tommorow...

Ive been trying to figure this stuff out, but i still cant seem to do it. If anyone feels like helping, it would be much appreciated

Just woke up, aight, what's the story for cardctl ident? It might not be under /sbin, the full path may be /usr/sbin, everything gets distro specific and I'm not sure where RedHat puts the most normal stuff anymore...

Dmesg doesn't seem to mention the existence of the card at all... which is perplexing, did you post what you had from right after you popped the card IN?

Looking at ident will give us an idea of what the card really is, so if its not in cardmgr's little library we can add it to that.

If it is in cardmgr's library: /etc/pcmcia/config AND /etc/pcmcia/wlan-ng.conf, then its another pcmcia issue, so that's why the dmesg output as I need to see what the kernel didn't see.

Cheers,

Finegan

alright, i ran dmesg and the closest thing i could get relating to the card was

dviert : not allocating diver_blk for non-ethernet device eth0
divert: no divert_blk to free, eht0 not ethernet
hermes.c: 5 Apr 2002 David Gibson <hermes@gibson.dropbear.id.au>
orinoco.c 011b (David Gibson <hermes@gibson.drobear.id.au> and others)
orinoco_cs.c 011b (samething in parenthesis)
orinoco_plx.c 0.11b (Daniel Barlow <dan@telnet.net>


Thats the main stuff that has anything to do with it in the dmesg.
Also, i know for a fact that this is an ethernet card for it has worked fine for me on the same machine under windows2k and xp.

Why in the world did it load the orinoco_plx module? this is a straight PCMCIA card right? Okay, I really need the ident line, does the command not work?

/sbin/cardctl ident

Cheers,

Finegan

sorry, i thought i had tolu you that before. here it is

Socet 0:
product info: "NETGEAR MA401RA Wireless PC", "Card", "ISL37300P", "Eval-RevA"
manfid: 0x00b, 0x7300
function: 6 (network)
Socket 1:
no product info available

Aight, open up /etc/pmcia/config in your favorite editor and add in these lines:

card "NETGEAR MA401RA Wireless PC"
manfid 0x000b, 0x7300
bind "orinoco_cs"

Exactly as they are, be careful of spacing. Now the driver in RH8 every once in a while has issues with this card, if you notice crappy transfer rates, post back and well get you an updated version of the driver. You have a alot of "error writing header to BAP" or somesuch at the end of dmesg.

after the file is edited, restart pcmcia HARD:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia restart

Then this should grab you a lease:

ifconfig eth0 up
dhclient eth0

If you run WEP then you'll have to add:

iwconfig eth0 essid nameofnetwork
iwconfig eth0 enc 21312312321 (whatever the key is)

before invoking dhclient.

That should do it... hopefully. The kernel may assign the card eth1 instead of eth0, so check dmesg after you hear the two happy beeps to see what device number it got assigned.

Cheers,

Finegan