wireless gateway problem on SUSE 9.3

LargoW · 10-05-2005, 01:56 PM

Hello,

I've an ACER Travelmate 430 with a buildin wireless card (an Intersil Prism 2.5). and a wired network card Realtek RTL-8139
My laptop has a dual boot WindowsXP - SUSE 9.3.
My home network has a SMC wireless router connected to the internet via a cable-modem, 3 pcs with Win XP and 2000.
The network is functional, each computers sees each other and have internet access under Windows.

My laptop, under SUSE 9.3, can see and access the internal network (ping, samba, network sharing, ..) through the wireless network card but cannot access the internet. When I plug a network cable in the Realtek connector without changing any configuration nor rebooting, miracle, my laptop can access the internet.

I've configured the default Gateway with Yast, it works with the wired network card, but not with the wireless network card.

my /etc/resolv.conf is :
nameserver 192.168.2.1
search workgroup

the ifcfg-wlan0 is :

BOOTPROTO='dhcp'
MTU=''
REMOTE_IPADDR=''
STARTMODE='auto'
UNIQUE='LHB6.1o+tnlD7E2E'
USERCONTROL='no'
WIRELESS_AP=''
WIRELESS_AUTH_MODE='sharedkey'
WIRELESS_BITRATE='auto'
WIRELESS_CHANNEL=''
WIRELESS_DEFAULT_KEY='0'
WIRELESS_ESSID='SMC Claude'
WIRELESS_FREQUENCY=''
WIRELESS_KEY=''
WIRELESS_KEY_0='32226118860000000000000000'
WIRELESS_KEY_1='32226118861111111111111111'
WIRELESS_KEY_2=''
WIRELESS_KEY_3=''
WIRELESS_KEY_LENGTH='128'
WIRELESS_MODE='Managed'
WIRELESS_NICK=''
WIRELESS_NWID=''
WIRELESS_POWER='yes'
WIRELESS_WPA_PSK=''
_nm_name='bus-pci-0000:02:02.0'
NAME='Intersil Prism 2.5 Wavelan chipset'
GATEWAY='192.168.2.1'

What's wrong ?

Brian1 · 10-05-2005, 02:28 PM

Can you ping and external IP out there on the net? If so try changing nameserver to your providers true DNS numbers. Also check and see if youe /etc/hosts.conf looks like this: order hosts,bind

See if that works.
Brian1

LargoW · 10-05-2005, 03:46 PM

thx for your reply.

ping to external ip doesn't work
message is "connect: Network is unreachable"

Brian1 · 10-07-2005, 05:27 PM

Turn off your security wep and wpa on both the router and wlan0 side. See if you can get out then.

Brian1

short101 · 10-07-2005, 10:06 PM

check the output of 'route' also ifdown the wired card, then bring up the wireless one.

LargoW · 10-08-2005, 05:38 AM

thanks

That's what I've tried

ifconfig eth0 down
/etc/init.d/network restart

and it works.

Brian1 · 10-08-2005, 03:22 PM

Glad to see you have it going. Must be using something like Network Manager to detec when network ports are connected. If you are only going to use the wireless mostly check your ifcfg-eth0 file and see if it says
onboot=no

and the ifcfg-wlan0 says
onboot=yes

Brian1

LargoW · 10-10-2005, 02:31 AM

Thanks Brian

at home, I use the wireless connection, but at work, I use the wired connection.

in both files, ifcfg-eth0 and ifcfg-wlan0, there is STARTMODE='auto'.

Is there a way to customized some script to detect the connected interface ?

Brian1 · 10-10-2005, 05:53 PM

In Fedora Core it uses Network Manager and I does not do a very good job with my hardware. So I removed it and run this two scripts to switch between either nics. It requires to have the commands ifdown anf ifup useable as a user. I added them to my sudeors file but if you are the only user you can set the sticky bit on each command. Both commands require root access.
chmod +s /sbin/ifup
chmod +s /sbin/ifdown

If you wish to modify your /etc/sudoers file then to do that it requires using the command ' visudo ' as root of course. Add a line like this.

Code:

username	ALL=NOPASSWD: /sbin/ifdown, /sbin/ifup

This allows only one person to use the command that requires root access but will not require the usage of a password to do the command. Most defaults use the vi editor. If you are new to vi it is pretty tricky to use. You can change to use your favorite editor by issing the command ' export EDITOR=nedit ' to use nedit or change to say nano ' export EDITOR=nano '.

Once that is added then create the two scripts and if you wish you can make softlinks to them to your Desktop. Note after making the script you will need to make them executable use the command ' chmod +x /home/username/home_eth0_down_eth1_up.sh '. Also replace all references to username to you username account. The last part in each script creates a small gui window showing your network interfaces to make sure they took. If not needed you can leave out the xmessage line. The ping statement is needed on some systems so the command can finish before the next one is run. Problably not needed in this type of setup until you get to the xmessage part.

Not knowing about scripting that great I am sure someone could write all this up in one script that ask you which nic you want up and also do it on the Desktop. That is one thing I would sure like to learn how to do.

Contents of file:///home/username/home_eth0_down_eth1_up.sh

Code:

#!/bin/sh

# This brings eth0 down.
sudo /sbin/ifdown eth0

# This creates a pause before running the next command.
ping -c3 127.0.0.1 > /dev/null

# This brings eth1 up
sudo /sbin/ifup eth1

# This creates a pause before running the next command.
ping -c3 127.0.0.1 > /dev/null

# xmessage -center -file /home/username/home_eth1_down_eth0_up.txt
ifconfig > /home/username/nicinfo
xmessage -center -file /home/username/nicinfo

Contents of file:///home/username/home_eth1_down_eth0_up.sh

Code:

#!/bin/sh
#This Brings eth1 down 
sudo /sbin/ifdown eth1

# This creates a pause before running the next command.
ping -c3 127.0.0.1 > /dev/null

# This brings eth0 up
sudo /sbin/ifup eth0

# This creates a pause before running the next command.
ping -c3 127.0.0.1 > /dev/null

# xmessage -center -file /home/username/home_eth1_down_eth0_up.txt
ifconfig > /home/username/nicinfo
xmessage -center -file /home/username/nicinfo

Hope this helps out.
Brian1