I have sort of posted this before without much response, so I thought I'ld try again and mebbe have more luck this time...

I have 2 notebook computers, both running RH7.3, both with 2 network cards.

Laptop1 is my 'desktop' it has a 100mbs nic inbuilt and a wireless enterasys 802.11DS pcmcia card

Laptop2 is my router it also has a wireless enterasys 802.11DS pcmcia card and a 10mbs pcmcia card.

everything was going well until I decided I really needed to access the net from laptop1 using winXP(Xtra Problems?) I couldn't do it using the wireless network (still haven't figured out why it wouldn't work) so I fiddled around a bit and got the cable network running between the 2.

At one stage, I had both networks running at once (in linux of course!) which i thought was kinda cool and then whammo... no more wireless...

I have tried everything I can think of to get the wireless going again, to no avail.

all lights are still working on the cards, ifconfig & iwconfig on both systems still report exactly what they used to and route seems to be ok... when I am running on cable only however, it takes a loooong time to come up with the gateway settings, could there be a problem there?

Is it more likely that just when i was doing all of this one of my wireless cards decided to up and die?

Unfortunately due to my location it is almost impossible to get access to another wireless network to try and see which machine/card is failing, however I am working on it! On that note, anyone in Cairns Australia have wireless running on their network?

If you're setting up the router laptop in ad-hoc mode, you might be being bitten by the old bug that the entersays cards are really just cut-down orinocos, so there's a difference between true "ibss" ad-hoc mode and the pre 802.11b spec ad-hoc "test" mode.

if you check the dmesg read on the card, if its pre 6.06 firmware (I think that's right), and the card is set to ad-hoc, its defaulting to "test" mode, the XP laptop is probably not capable of talking "test" mode at all.

Cheers,

Finegan

thanks finegan,

am going to upgrade firmware to 6.06, see if that helps, maybe I have managed to set one of the cards to true ibss, seems the only way I can tell is by the cell address when connected, but if not working then very hard to tell what mode I'm in.

Its just the default setting of the driver, its capable of both modes, just defaults to "test" with the older firmware... also 6.06 seems pretty old too, as far as I know its just a rebranded orinoco card so the newest firmware should be 8.x-ish

There's a Q+A in the Orinoco Readme from the source package. Just scan down to the mentioning of IBSS:

http://ozlabs.org/people/dgibson/dld...README.orinoco

Cheers,

Finegan

hmm..
both cards now running true ibss mode, still no (well.. very little) communication

how can i tell if one or other of the cards has failed? all the lights are on, they both make 2 beeps on install, everything seems to be right but they just aint talking.

currently iwconfig gives
laptop 1:
[root@gilbert root]# iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

eth1 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"GTFNET" Nickname:"gilbert"
Mode:Ad-Hoc Frequency:2.422GHz Cell: 00:E0:63:82B:F2
Bit Rate:2Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm Sensitivity:1/3
RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Encryption keyff
Power Managementff
Link Quality:0/92 Signal level:-102 dBm Noise level:-102 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

laptop 2:
[root@eldric root]# iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

ppp0 no wireless extensions.

eth0 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"GTFNET" Nickname:"eldric"
Mode:Ad-Hoc Frequency:2.422GHz Cell: 00:E0:63:83:09:8A
Bit Rate:2Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm Sensitivity:1/3
RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Encryption keyff
Power Managementff
Link Quality:0/92 Signal level:-102 dBm Noise level:-102 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

eth1 no wireless extensions.

signal and noise levels seem very large.

should my next step be to try and get access to another card/access point?

What's the chunk of dmesg from both cards?

This is a little weird as if they're associated, they should have the same cell address...

Also, to keep the smiley explosion from happening use the ]code[ tag, (reverse the brackets for it to work).

Cheers,

Finegan

its odd.. for some reason the drivers almost seem to be loading twice?
I restarted pcmcia and then did a dmesg on both machines, I think I've got the relevant bits, the initialization failures have got me worried, currently using wvlan_cs and setting config via /etc/pcmcia/config.opts as I can't seem to get orinoco drivers going (lots of unresolved symbols when compiling, tried the tricks that dgibson has mentioned, can't recompile kernels because system hangs when loading initrd.

laptop 1 dmesg:
wvlan_cs: Driver unloaded
cs: IO port probe 0x0c00-0x0cff: clean.
cs: IO port probe 0x0100-0x04ff: excluding 0x378-0x37f 0x4d0-0x4d7
cs: IO port probe 0x0a00-0x0aff: clean.
wvlan_cs: WaveLAN/IEEE PCMCIA driver v1.0.6
wvlan_cs: (c) Andreas Neuhaus <andy@fasta.fh-dortmund.de>
wvlan_cs: index 0x01: Vcc 5.0, irq 3, io 0x0100-0x013f
wvlan_cs: Registered netdevice eth1
wvlan_cs: MAC address on eth1 is 00 e0 63 82 db f2
wvlan_cs: Found firmware 0x60006 (vendor 1) - Firmware capabilities : 1-1-1-1-1
wvlan_cs: This firmware require an ESSID in Ad-Hoc mode, please use iwconfig.
wvlan_cs: Initialization failed!
wvlan_cs: MAC address on eth1 is 00 e0 63 82 db f2
wvlan_cs: Found firmware 0x60006 (vendor 1) - Firmware capabilities : 1-1-1-1-1
wvlan_cs: Valid channels: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
[root@gilbert pcmcia]#

laptop 2 dmesg:
wvlan_cs: Driver unloaded
unloading Kernel Card Services
Linux Kernel Card Services 3.1.22
options: [pci] [cardbus] [pm]
PCI: Found IRQ 10 for device 00:08.0
PCI: Sharing IRQ 10 with 00:08.1
PCI: Sharing IRQ 10 with 01:00.0
PCI: Found IRQ 10 for device 00:08.1
PCI: Sharing IRQ 10 with 00:08.0
PCI: Sharing IRQ 10 with 01:00.0
Yenta IRQ list 0a88, PCI irq10
Socket status: 30000010
Yenta IRQ list 0a88, PCI irq10
Socket status: 30000010
cs: IO port probe 0x0c00-0x0cff: clean.
cs: IO port probe 0x0100-0x04ff: excluding 0x378-0x37f 0x398-0x39f 0x4d0-0x4d7
cs: IO port probe 0x0a00-0x0aff: clean.
cs: memory probe 0xa0000000-0xa0ffffff: clean.
wvlan_cs: WaveLAN/IEEE PCMCIA driver v1.0.6
wvlan_cs: (c) Andreas Neuhaus <andy@fasta.fh-dortmund.de>
wvlan_cs: ``station_name'' is an obsolete module parameter, please use iwconfig.<6>wvlan_cs: index 0x01: Vcc 5.0, irq 3, io 0x0100-0x013f
wvlan_cs: Registered netdevice eth0
wvlan_cs: MAC address on eth0 is 00 e0 63 83 09 8a
wvlan_cs: Found firmware 0x60006 (vendor 1) - Firmware capabilities : 1-1-1-1-1
wvlan_cs: This firmware require an ESSID in Ad-Hoc mode, please use iwconfig.
wvlan_cs: Initialization failed!
wvlan_cs: MAC address on eth0 is 00 e0 63 83 09 8a
wvlan_cs: Found firmware 0x60006 (vendor 1) - Firmware capabilities : 1-1-1-1-1
wvlan_cs: Valid channels: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
eth1: NE2000 Compatible: io 0x300, irq 9, hw_addr 00:00:21:12:8A:6A
[root@eldric root]#

Finegan...

any luck decipering the dmesg outputs yet??

don't mean to be badgering you, but you do seem to be the resident guru on all things wireless!

No, sorry man, I missed the reply mail by accident, once a week I go through about 20 replies and must have zapped yours in the middle of a stupid attack.

This one buggers me. As far as I can tell, the cards just simply should associate. That, and I haven't used the wvlan_cs driver since I first got orinoco to successfully compile back around 2.4.5... and back when I was playing with it, I didn't know what I was doing much so what I remember really wouldn't help. That, and the orinoco_cs and wvlan_cs drivers with their original chipsets, the Lucent/Agere like the Entersays has, always worked somewhat magically well, so there was nothing much to learn... this is only the second time really I've posted on a real Lucent problem that didn't have to do with WEP.

So, to debunk my guru status, here are some thoughts... from dmesg you've got in-kernel pcmcia running, its RedHat 7.3, which was redhat's uber-stupid release as regards to laptops as they shipped in-kernel pcmcia, hence brand new kernel modules for pcmcia cards, but an archaic pcmcia-cs (year+ old), so the /etc/pcmcia/config file that shipped won't even let cardmgr bind 1/5 of the modules it has available... bright huh? Distros blow off laptops a lot.

If you grab the patch file from:

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

Just copy it into /etc/pcmcia/ and it should load the orinoco_cs modules that are precompiled with 7.3.

Now, Entersays may have shipped the card with a funky ident line, so if the module doesn't load the orinoco, check back with the output of:

/sbin/cardctl ident

Oh, to drop a little secret I don't advertise, everything I know comes from the fact that I'm poor, and for months and months I worked on trying to get a WPC11 v1 prism2 card working when it was actually quite fried.


Cheers,

Finegan

Thanks finegan,

Orinoco loaded and running, i think I've got a fried card. I've just about had enough of RH too!
as soon as I can, I'm getting slackware9 and another wireless card,

I actually have one of those loverly Dlink 650+ ones and suprise suprise, dlink in australia are going to take it back and give me a 660, which has drivers for RH & Suse or summat, I'm hoping I can get it to work with Slackware!

I've never heard of a 660... if its a vanilla 650, its just another prism2 card... orinoco modules again, although I would upgrade past v.11b that's in the slack 9.0 2.4.20 kernel and d/l from dave's site (above link), the v13c of the driver, it compiles clean on slackware 9.0, I did it last night, about half an hour after installing.

Cheers,

Finegan

from what they tell me its main difference is that it has an antenna jack.

cheers for the tip on versions!

now if only I had broadband..
(one of the reasons I'm doing the wireless thing, so I can hook into my friends connection some day)

thanks again,

Smerk

Ooo-err its working now!!

little wireless transmissions floating through the air in exactly the same way that bricks don't!

Ooo-err its working now!!

little wireless transmissions floating through the air in exactly the same way that bricks don't!
for more info see:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=54093