How to know if a wireless card is activated or not???

firewiz87 · 11-19-2008, 08:57 AM

I have a D-link DWL G510 H/W ver: C2 wireless card...... its now working, after installing the Ralink drivers....

I think it never gets activated on boot.... I always have to do the

Code:

#ifconfig wlan0 up

command before i connect to my wireless network using Rutilt....

I would like to know if there is a command that will report the state of the wireless card (up/down)

I would also like to know how to bring up the device and then make it connect to my home network on boot.....

Thanks in advance!!

pentode · 11-19-2008, 01:35 PM

What distro do you have? In Debian and its derivatives, there is a file /etc/network/interfaces that you can edit to specify happens when the interface is brought up. You can try iwconfig to report on the status of the wireless interfaces.

firewiz87 · 11-19-2008, 02:19 PM

I am using OpenSUSE 11.0

firewiz87 · 11-19-2008, 11:48 PM

What changes do i have to make to the /etc/network/interfaces file??

pentode · 11-20-2008, 06:24 PM

Can you post the contents of /etc/network/interfaces?

lumak · 11-22-2008, 12:55 AM

Try this...

cat /sys/class/net/wlan0/carrier

If cat fails, It means that the device is down
If cat spits out a '0' zero it means it is up but not connected to a network
If cat spits out a '1' one it means it is up and connected to a network

Code:

cat /sys/class/net/$interface/carrier 1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null || echo "Your interface $interface is down.

cat /sys/class/net/$interface/carrier 1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null && echo "Your interface $interface is up.

if [ `cat /sys/class/net/$interface/carrier` -eq 1 ]; then echo "Your interface $interface is connected."; fi

if [ `cat /sys/class/net/$interface/carrier` -eq 0 ]; then echo "Your interface $interface is up but not connected."; fi

Being that this is linux. There are 100 different ways to get this information from other sys files in possibly better ways.

firewiz87 · 11-23-2008, 12:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pentode

Can you post the contents of /etc/network/interfaces?

I cannot find the file you specified....

However the following files seem similar..

/etc/network

Code:

#
# networks	This file describes a number of netname-to-address
#		mappings for the TCP/IP subsystem.  It is mostly
#		used at boot time, when no name servers are running.
#

loopback	127.0.0.0
link-local	169.254.0.0

# End.

AVT · 11-24-2008, 09:16 PM

openSUSE doesn't have a /etc/network/interfaces file - that's only in Debian-based distributions.

Instead, open YaST, find the network setup. If it's not getting started on boot, it's not configured. Configure the card to use DHCP, and you should be fine.

firewiz87 · 12-05-2008, 11:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by AVT

openSUSE doesn't have a /etc/network/interfaces file - that's only in Debian-based distributions.

Instead, open YaST, find the network setup. If it's not getting started on boot, it's not configured. Configure the card to use DHCP, and you should be fine.

The wireless card is wrongly identified by Yast..... i am using the wireless card after manually installing the driver.... it seems that none of the wizards work with the card... even network manager does not.... so i was wondering if there is something that can be done without wizards....

I read that creation of a script will init.d do.... can somebody point me to a tutorial??