Wifi0 Not Working On Boot.
 

Hi,

I have a bit of a strange situation but nothing too difficult..I think.
I have the Netgear WG311T installed using the madwifi drivers and it is working great but on boot it says that it is getting the ip address for Wifi0 and it fails.

When it is booted I cant connect to wifi0 but if I dhclient ath0 I can connect to my router just fine.

For some reason there is a wifi0 and an ath0 but on the wifi0 is displayed in network-config-tools and it wont connect.

So what is the wifi0 and why wont it connect and how can I get it or ath0 to connect on boot?

Iwconfig (connected to ath0):


lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

wifi0 no wireless extensions.

ath0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"NETGEAR"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point: 00:14:6C:AB:63:C6
Bit Rate:54 Mb/s Tx-Power:18 dBm Sensitivity=0/3
Retry:off RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=34/94 Signal level=-61 dBm Noise level=-95 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:1145 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

sit0 no wireless extensions.




ifconfig (connected to ath0):


ath0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:14:6C:8D:2C:2E
inet addr:192.168.0.2 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::214:6cff:fe8d:2c2e/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:1299 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:1389 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:1002924 (979.4 KiB) TX bytes:256990 (250.9 KiB)

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:D0:B7:DE:0A:A4
inet6 addr: fe80::2d0:b7ff:fede:aa4/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:23 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:5848 (5.7 KiB)

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:5052 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:5052 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:6425064 (6.1 MiB) TX bytes:6425064 (6.1 MiB)

wifi0 Link encap:UNSPEC HWaddr 00-14-6C-8D-2C-2E-C8-69-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:11299 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:5849
TX packets:1431 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:199
RX bytes:2147574 (2.0 MiB) TX bytes:292209 (285.3 KiB)
Interrupt:201 Memory:e09e0000-e09f0000



THanks for your help,
TOkenhost

what does your /etc/network/interfaces file look like?

I think I forgot to mention I am on Fedora Core 6 and I dont seem to have that file or directory for some reason.

Fixed. Sorry about that. It was just simply enabling it to start on boot in system-config-network. I am still not sure what wifi0 is though. I have 3 network interfaces: wifi0, eth0 (my wired network), ath0 (my wireless network). I have set this up using the madwifi drivers.

Hi tokenhost,

in the last few days I had a big fight with my laptop and PCMCIA wifi card. I am useing madwifi. So wifi0 seems some kind of basic point what you are not able to modify. When your driver starts (i guess ath_pci) it will create athx from this point.

Here is a link what you have to check on the madwifi(point)org/wiki/UserDocs/FirstTimeHowTo

Peter

Thanks,
I just disabled the interface wifi0 from starting on boot and enabled ath0 and eth0 to start on boot with eth0 being static ip and ath0 as dhcp and it works like a charm. :D

Madwifi drivers use wifi0 as a control interface. Let say you use your Atheros card as an access point. If you have two clients, one supporting WEP and another WPA2. Instead of using WEP for both, you can create two virtual interfaces (ath0, ath1) and define their settings separately using wlanconfig and the wifi0 interface.