Adding linux box (wireless) to existing home network
 

Hi all,

Here is my situation. I am trying to add a linux box (RH9.0) to my existing home network via a wireless connection. More specifics:
Home network set up via a netgear RT311 router with a DSL connection to the internet. I have two XP machines connected via ethernet to a switch to the router. I have a DWL - 900AP+ hanging off the switch also. The router is set up as a dhcp server. The linux box has a netgear WG311 pci card that I downloaded the driver for and installed.

The DWL access point is set up: as an "Access Point", and a "dhcp client". Don't know if this makes any difference. Other options are "Wireless Client", Wireless Bridge, Repeater.

Currently, when I boot up the linux box and do the iwconfig stuff I see the linux box on the router's dhcp table, but when I do a ping on the linux box for the router I get back "Network is unreachable". Not sure what this means.

I can ping the Access Point from my XP machine, but cannot ping the linux box from it.

Any help would be appeciated
TIA
Dave

I don't really know wireless networking at all. But there's got to be a "iwconfig -a" command (if not that, then the ifconfig -a should do it). This will tell you the settings that RH has for the wireless card you have. That output might help.

I've included both the iwconfig and ifconfig -a output.

iwconfig:
lo no wireless extensions.
ath0 IEEE 802.11 ESSID:"default"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.447GHz Access Point: 00:40:05:5B:49:00

Bit Rate:11Mb/s Tx-Power:off Sensitivity=0/3
Retry:off RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality:0/92 Signal level:15/154 Noise level:0/154
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

ifconfig -a:
ath0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:09:5B:84:90:DB
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:778 errors:1772683 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:3462
TX packets:396 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:199
RX bytes:286368 (279.6 Kb) TX bytes:128354 (125.3 Kb)
Interrupt:5 Memory:d0920000-d0930000

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:26764 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:26764 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:1827208 (1.7 Mb) TX bytes:1827208 (1.7 Mb)

Thanks,
Dave

your ath0 doesn't have an IP address, it should have the "inet addr: " field filled in. I'm not really too good with troubleshooting DHclients in Linux. Perhaps you can try a static IP address to test if you can get connectivity. You can use (as root) redhat-config-network to set the static IP. The IP has to be outside the range of addresses that your DHCP server is handing out. You also need to feed it the DNS servers and the default gateway in order for it to work. That should get you running in the meantime until you figure out why it's not getting an IP address from the DHCP server.

PS when you post output in the future, you can enclose it between the [ code ] [ / code ] tags (remove the spaces in the tags) and it won't use the smileys.

Hi,
Been away for a while, before I go the static ip route I wanted to say that I see the ip address for my linux box in my router DHCP table, but I can not ping it. Nor can I ping from my linux box to the router. Just wondering if there is some additional network configuration that I need to do in some file somewhere?

Dave