With all the wireless postings in this forum I'm a bit embarrased to be posting another one but I'm at a dead end. I'm running Mandrake 8.2 on a dual boot desktop and for the most part all is running fine. The nic card that is connected to my cable modem is configured as eth0 and I have no problems with my internet connection. My problem is that I have a Orinoco silver wireless card for networking between the desktop and my laptop and I cannot get it recognized as eth1. I can run linuxconf and eth1 will show up there. Everything works well in windows so I know the hardware is working . Iwconfig shows no wireless extentions and ifconfig show only eth0 and lo.
So where do I go from here?

Sorry about this but I should have mentioned in my original reply that I downloaded hermes.conf and managed to switch from wvlan to orinoco_cs as my driver module and this shows up in dmsg. lsmode also shows orinoco_cs and hermes modules.

do:

ifconfig -a

What does this show?
If it only shows eth0 and lo, then you don't have all of the modules
installed for the wireless card. If it shows either eth1 or wlan0, then you
have the modules installed, but you don't have the device set up with an
IP address (etc.).

as root, ifconfig -a shows only eth0 and lo. What other modules are needed and where do I get them.

Thanks

Well, you say you've got the orinco_cs and hermes modules installed. Do
you have the pcmcia modules installed (you should, since the card modules
shouldn't load without them, unless you've got that built into the kernel).
Can you post:
dmesg | grep -i pcmcia

entering "dmesg | grep -i pcmcia" as root only brings me back to the root command prompt.
In my /etc/pcmcia file I show the following files:

cis directory
config --- config opts.
ftl --- ftl opts.
hermes conf.
ide --- ide opts.
isdn
memory --- memory opts.
network
parport --- parport opts.
scsi ---scsi opts.
serial --- serial opts.
shared
wireless --- wireless opts.

I hope this info proves helpfull to you. Thanks for sticking with me on this.

Ok,
I made an assumption that may not be valid (almost certainly is, though).
The assumption was that your wireless card is a PCMCIA card. . . If that
is the case, then you may not be starting up the necessary pcmcia drivers
for this to work.

post the result of:
lsmod

Also, look in your initialization directory (I think it's /etc/init.d, not sure with
mandrake) for a pcmcia startup script. If it's there, and the "lsmod"
didn't show any pcmcia modules loaded (AND you don't have the pcmcia
stuff built in, though dmesg should have returned something if you did),
then try running the PCMCIA init script by hand. Let me know what the
output is.

Another place you can check is in /proc. This directory has a bunch of
useful information in the files, most of which can simply be cat-ed:
cat filename

lsmod output:

sd-mod
sr-mod
sb
sb_lib
uart 401
sound
sound core
parport pc
parport
orinoco_cs
orinoco
hermes
ds
yenta socket 9344 1
pcmcia_core 41824 0 [ orinoco_cs ds yenta_socket]
af_packet
tulip
nls_iso8859
ufat
fat
supermount
ide_scsi
scsi mod
rtc

when the machine is booting there is a line that says "pcmcia starting". Also there is a line which says "cardmgr failed to get info on device, resource temporarily unavailable". I don't know if this pertains to my problem or not.
As far as start up scripts go I don't enough about them to follow thru on your instructions. However I can get pcmcia to restart with /etc/rc.d/ init.d/pcmcia/ restart. (i picked that one up in another posting) . It restarts with only " cardmgr ".

Hope this helps some
thanks -- Mike

Ok, so the init.d is in /etc/rc.d, good. =-}

/etc/rc.d is your scripts directory, and init.d is the initialization directory, so
you found what I was looking for. However, you've already answered my
question, which was whether the pcmcia stuff was starting correctly (it is).

So, your wireless card is (for some reason) not being initialized.
Do you have /sbin/wlanctl-ng ?
Can you post a listing of what is in your /etc/pcmcia directory (if it exists)?

I have not been able to find /sbin/wlanctl-ng either in the GUI or at the command prompt. As for the contents of my /etc/pcmcia directory, they as follows:

cid directory
config
config opts.
ftc
ftc opts.
hermes.conf
ide
ide opts.
isdn
isdn opts.
memory
memory opts.
network
parport
parpart opts.
scsi
scsi opts.
serial
serial opts.
shared
wireless
wireless opts.

Again I hope this helps,

Thanks
Mike

It helps.
It seems to me that you don't have the right drivers installed becuase
you aren't even seeing the device with ifconfig, which has always seen
my devices unless they didn't have the modules loaded. . . Where did you
find these drivers?

Please post the output of (I hope it's there):

ls /proc/net

or, if that doesn't work,

ls /proc/dev

hallo all!
thanks for the informations from you, I have the same Problem, just now I have checked it, but it shows:

1. linux start: "eth1: failed to reset wireless card"
2. lsmod: "orinoco_cs (unused)",
but "pcmcia-core [orinoco_cs ds yenta-socket]"
3. ifconfig -a: shows only eth0 and lo, (similar mop's)
4. /proc/net/wireless/ : empty

maybe I need a module and compile it, but I am not sure, where is the problem, and how to solve it?
greetings!

The output of lsproc/net is as follows:
arp
atm/
dev
dev_mcast
igmp
ir_mr_cache
ip_mr_cache
netlink
packet
psched
raw
route
rt_acct
rt_cache
rt_cache_stat
snmp
sockstat
softnet_stat
tcp
tr_rif
udp
unix
wireless

For ls /proc/dev I get no such file or device, and that is as root.
Once again thanks for sticking with me on this.

mpo,

orinoco_cs is indeed the right module for the job, if its loading that's a good start. Why it isn't initializing an eth1 is odd. Are there any intitialization errors in "dmesg" right after you pop in the card. Sometimes pcmcia-cs will give you the two beeps of happiness but the card will still fail. This can be no big deal in the long run, probably this can be sorted byy what errors are in "dmesg"

iwconfig without arguments never returns information on a card that is not currently ifconfig'ed "up". Depending on the version of wireless tools and wireless extensions you have, iwconfig may be able to manipulate some of the settings on a card while the device is down.

/sbin/wlan-ng-ctl doesn't apply, that's the non-kernel drivers that were developed for the prism2 series cards and if I remember right, is not part of Mandrake 8.2 (although it is in 9.0). Doesn't matter, wrong set for this card. Oddly enough the orinoco_cs module supports prism2 cards, although by reports its rather spotty as to how well it handles them.

If you want to pull the hermes.conf file and continue using wvlan_cs, there is no real problems with that driver. All of the hubub on this board about getting orinoco_cs to load was so that people with prism2 cards or 3com airconnects could get it to work. The wvlan_cs driver works great, heck it runs the card in the laptop that serves as my wireless router.

All current distributions have wireless extensions compiled into the kernel or as a module, so even my desktop has a /proc/net/wireless and it will always remain empty (okay, not with the newest version of extensions, but thats in 2.5.x so lets not worry about it yet), until the card is ifconfig'ed "up".

Echojin,

Are you certain this is the same problem? Most importantly, what card and specifically version number of that card are you using? Also, what distro? Your profile says RH7.3 but I don't want to take anything for granted.

Cheers,

Finegan

I pulled the card out and inserted it back in and it resulted in the usual one high beep and one low beep a couple of seconds later. The output at the end of dmesg when i do this is:
hermes.c
orinoco.c
orinoco_cs
orinoco_cs: Request IRC:resource in use

There are a couple of other errors in dmesg but I don't think they pertain to this wireless problem. If you want, tell me how to get the entire dmesg output copied to the reply message and I'll do it.

Thanks
Mike