I have RedHat 9 running on a Toshiba laptop. I got a Netgear MA401 wireless pc card. When I insert it, i hear i hear 2 beeps.

I setup everything according to my AP.
-WEP disabled
-obtain ip

when I ifup eth1 ... it fails

I know this is very little info, but was hoping that someone who knows more than me can ask the right questions and hopefully figure out what is wrong.

First NIC is eth0. Do you really have 2 NIC ?

Are you using the linux-wlan-ng wireless PCIMIA module? Ready made RPM's for Redhat 9 are available from: http://prism2.unixguru.raleigh.nc.us/
Be sure you install the appropriate module for your kernel version. If you already have these installed, your MA401 ought to be called "wlan0", not "eth1".

Yes I have another hard wire card in eth0.

I'll try those, and let you know.

THX

There are two MA401's one is an MA401RA and the other is a plain MA401. They both ship in the same box. Netgeat messed up. You most likely have an RA since I haven't' seen anyone with a plain 401.

The 401RA uses orinoco and the 401 uses wlan. The second beep you hear means that orinoco was loaded successfully. I'm going to assume RH 9.0 still uses the redhat-config-network uitlity that was 8.0. Did you set up everything correctly when running it? If you did then clicking activate should bring up eth1.

I did all that, but it just sits there then shows an error

Determining IP information for eth1...

then it had some stuff about ping 192.168.0.1

then failed

so I tried wlan

pretty much the same thing is happening without the ping stuff

I tried with and without WEP, exact same thing seems to be happening.

I going to have to get a buddy with his laptop and working wireless to see if maybe something weird with the ap or my card.

ohh yeah and while using wlan, dmesg returns a bunch of

p80211knetdev_hard_start_xmit: Tx attempt prior to association, frame dropped.

THX

You've got the linux-wlan module loaded then. The device isn't eth1, its wlan0... and this came onboard RedHat by default? Crap...

To continue to use wlan-ng, go to /etc/pcmcia/ and edit wlan-ng.opts to your liking.

To use the orinoco_cs module, which version you have doesn't work well with WEP, you can just move the file: /etc/pcmcia/wlan-ng.conf somewhere else and add:

http://ozlabs.org/people/dgibson/dldwd/hermes.conf

into /etc/pcmcia

The orinoco_cs driver is part of the kernel, v.11b doesn't work well with the MA401RA with WEP enabled, there are some firmware bugs it doesn't work around well until v.13x, which you can d/l from here:

http://ozlabs.org/people/dgibson/dldwd/

The wlan-ng modules don't pay attention to the kernel API for settings, so you have to change that file from above and reload pcmcia in order to make wireless changes. With the orinoco module you can just change the settings with:

iwconfig

Cheers,

Finegan

Hmmm.... Well.. I can tell you step by step what I did on getting it on RH 8.0 if that will help.. it's kinda long though....

finegan:
I have wlan installed now and it is now wlan0, but I don't have a wlan-ng.opts in /etc/pcmcia/.

I do have a wlan-ng.conf

I'm assuming that these are not the equivalent file.

rmartine:
if you are willing to write out step by step, by all means.

But this is what I have done so far.

-installed the 3 packages of wlan for redhat 9 and my kernel version.
-setup /etc/wlan/wlan.conf and /etc/wlan/wlancfg-* according to what I think my ap needs
-rebooted for the hell of it

It looks like to me that it isn't receiving a dhcp offer, but I'm not positive it is sending a request

According to a wlan-ng website I recently visited, the wlan module DOES work with M401A (on the other hand, don't believe everything you hear).
Supposing that you need wlan and that it is installed correctly, you should see the following during boot up:
Starting wlan... OK
...other startup stuff...
Bringing up network interface wlan0... OK
If you don't see the first message, then the module wasn't loaded. If you don't see the second message, the interface was never started. If you see the messaged out of order, something is seriously screwed up.
As a test, run "ifup wlan0" as root. Post the result.
Also, does your network use DHCP? If so, make sure your firewall isn't blocking it. If your IP is static, then you must make some changes to your wlan settings.
Finally, be aware that you may not be able to get a wireless card and an ethernet card working at the same time. I've heard rumors of an IRQ conflict. If you have the time, try disabling your ethernet card at startup and try starting just the wireless card.

It doesn't say anything about wlan on boot, but I don't have wlan0 set to start on boot.

when I $ifup wlan0

Error for wireless request "Set Encode" (8B2A) :
SET failed on device wlan0 ; Function not implemented.
Error for wireless request "Set ESSID" (8B2A) :
SET failed on device wlan0 ; Function not implemented.

Determining IP information for wlan0... failed.


I read in the wlan faq to ignore the two errors (last question)
ftp://ftp.linux-wlan.org/pub/linux-wlan-ng/FAQ

And it just sits for about a minute before failed is returned.
Firewall is off.

As for the wireless and ethernet, well you can look at the problem I had before, it seems to persist with the wireless.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=54254

Could you humor me a second. It seems that wlan is an evil little thing that should be shot. The orinoco driver never complained about anything. Could you please run this command.

grep -n Netgear /etc/pcmcia/config

Then open up the config file and jump to the line grep outputs and see what your card is bound too. Try using orinoco becuase it's simpler.

The way it's bound is like this.

card "Netgear MA401-RA"
manfid 0x000b, 0x7300
bind "orinoco_cs"

I don't really know if you have to do this because I'm hoping 9.0 uses version 13 of orinoco. 8.0 uses version 12 and those lines are in the config file.

If nothing pops up then add those lines to the wireless cards section in /etc/pcmcia/config

From there I made a wireless connection using redhat-config-network and used the Lucent wireless prism2 thingy. Then I just entered the settings , SSID and WEP key etc..from my roomate (network admin). I clicked activate and eth1 was brought up.

I dunno what to say if that doesn't work... cuz that's all I did.

That's the way I was hoping it would work. Well I uninstalled wlan and tried orinoco again. And went through the neat setup again but when I try to activate

Determining IP information for eth1. . .PING 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.

--- 192.168.0.1 ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 0 received, +3 errors, 100% packet loss, time 2016ms, pipe 3

PING 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.

--- 192.168.0.1 ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 0 received, +3 errors, 100% packet loss, time 2000ms, pipe 3
failed.


THX

8.0 shipped v.11b, 9.0 ships... you guessed it: v.11b

Redhat ran with the default kernel version with their 2.4.19.

v.13c is going to be in 2.4.21 when it finalizes, maybe even .13d if it makes it into one of the next few rc's.

rmartine is dead on though, the wlan-ng modules are usually more trouble then they're worth, they used to be the only thing supporting prism2 cards... about a year and a half ago and these vendors are a little slow to change their pages, if they even bother.

The rpm for the wlan-ng modules unpacked a file called /etc/pcmcia/wlan-ng.conf, that's what's telling cardmgr to bind the prism2_cs module. Just move that file out of that directory, put it anywhere but there. Then add this file:

http://ozlabs.org/people/dgibson/dldwd/hermes.conf

To the directory: /etc/pcmcia/

and hard restart pcmcia with:

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

The orinoco_cs module should load, and if there's no WEP being used you should be able to get an IP with:

ifconfig eth1 up
dhclient eth1

Cheers,

Finegan

k, I did all that, but

# dhclient eth1

...
/sbin/dhclient-script: configuration for eth1 not found.
Listening on LPF/eth1/**:**:**:**:**:**
Sending on LPF/eth1/**:**:**:**:**:**
Sending on Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 6
DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 11
DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 13
DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 13
DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 14
DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 4
No DHCPOFFERS received.
No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.
/sbin/dhclient-script: configuration for eth1 not found.