woe is my wireless conx! - F5D6020 ver. 01.02 pcmcia
 

As a previous poster about this card pleaded: help me save the rest of my hair! I've read so many posts about this card and tried various fixes, but no to avail and much newbie confusion.

First the specs: running feather (kernel 2.4.27; the same thing happened with damn small linux btw) on an old PI Toshiba 420CDT w/ 40M of RAM. The card is recognized and lit up nicely, which gives me hope. I'll post below the output of various commands. Would love any feedback / suggestions / help you can spare!

When I boot up with the wireless card inserted I get a string of "eth0: error -5..." and "eth0: error -10..." msgs. (...though I can usually avoid that by specifying nodhcp in the kernel boot options, though it looks like they're repeated in dmesg below.)

Here are the parameters I specified for the wireless setup utility:

essid: First Floor
nwid:
mode: Managed
channel:
frequency: 2.462G
key:
additional parameters: sens -80 rate 11M
iwspy eth0:
iwpriv eth0:
dhcp: yes

(the log in the shell of this utility gives at various places an "eth0SIOCSIFFLAGS: Input/output error" and finally "Operation failed." Though sometimes I get "OK. auto lo" and then the shell closes. After it says OK, here's the output of the following commands:

cardctl ident:

Socket 0:
no product info available
Socket 1:
product info: "Belkin", "11Mbps Wireless Notebook Network Adapter", "Version 01.02", ""
manfid: 0x0156, 0x0002
function: 6 (network)

iwconfig:

lo no wireless extensions

eth0 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"First Floor" Nickname:"Jalopytosheeb"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point: <our AP!>
Bit Rate:11Mb/s Tx-Power=15dBm Sensitivity:1/3
Retry min limit:8 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption_key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=8/92 Signal level=-94dBm Noise level=-149dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

ifconfig eth0:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet Hwaddr <our address!>
inet addr:<an assigned IP> Bcast:<correct address> Mask:255.255.255.0
BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:27 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:9 errors:53895 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:4840 (4.7 KiB) TX bytes:3710 (3.6 KiB)
Interrupt:3 Base address:0x100

lsmod:

Module Size Used by Not tainted
autofs4 8756 0 (unused)
serial 52068 0
af_packet 13544 0
orinoco_cs 4468 0
ds 6536 2 [orinoco_cs]
orinoco 32908 0 [orinoco_cs]
hermes 5124 0 [orinoco_cs orinoco]
i82365 12612 2
pcmcia_core 39840 0 [orinoco_cs ds i82365]
apm 9736 1
rtc 7004 0
ieee1394 183300 0 (unused)
ataraid 6404 0 (unused)
ide-cd 28704 0
ide-scsi 9072 0

dmsg:

<the msg. seems to time out because the beginning of it is cut off, then a string about 75 lines long with the error:>
eth0: Error -110 writing Tx descriptor to BAP
<with a slightly different error in the midst of that string:>
eth0: Error -110 setting multicast list.
<then the following:>
orinoco_lock() called with the hw_unavailable (dev=c2493000)
NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out
eth0: Tx timeout! ALLOCFID=ffff, TXCOMPLFID=ffff, EVSTAT=ffff
orinoco_lock() called with the hw_unavailable (dev=c2493000)
eth0: New link status: Connected (0001)
eth0: Error -5 setting channel
eth0: Error -5 configuring card

***************************

Can anyone tell me--apart from all the hair this card has cost me--what my problem is and how to fix it??? Thanks for all your help!

Am I correct in assuming that your Internet connection DOES indeed work, considering that ifconfig is showing assigned IP addresses and such?

Is the problem just that it's echoing those things on boot?

If so, what application are you using to set up your wireless connection?

Thanks for responding! It gives me hope to have a slackware user take interest. As for the problem, I'm not sure what to say since I don't really understand it. The first problem I'd imagine is that it is echoing those things on boot, giving me the string of eth0 errors I mentioned. Presumably related to that problem is the fact that when I can get some *kind* of connection (IP address assigned, etc.), I still cannot get online (DNS errors, can't resolve...). At first, I wondered whether that might be due to the fact that the link quality is poor / connecting with an old card at a distance. So I took my laptop right next to our router and tried to connect, but had the same problem. Could it be that the drivers that load can't get a good lock on the signal? Wondering in that vein, I did look into ndiswrapper, but I don't have the bel6020 file I'd need for it. Maybe I can ask someone to send it to me since Belkin no longer has it on their website.

The application I used to set the connection up btw was just the network card configuration utility that comes in Feather. Are there commands that would be better / help troubleshoot? Thanks again!

Looking at this line:
I can see that you were pretty far away. To tell if you aren't getting a good signal next to it, give me the output of iwconfig and ifconfig while your laptop is next to the router. Make sure you've been trying to connect to the Internet and get a few DNS issues as well before running these commands, as that might also tell me if packets are being lost in the fray or if something else is going on.

You could try that, but if it's not on the site, it's probably going to be hard to find :/

Make sure you are using the latest version of Feather while you are at it, there might be a newer kernel with newer drivers that address these issues.

Also, try running it WITHOUT these parameters:

Those should be automatically detected by iwconfig, and a slight variation (like your router "saying" its 2.462G and actually being 2.459G, or something) could cause some problems.

Thanks again for your reply, Aeiri, and sorry to be away so long. I got distracted trying to help a friend with bcm43xx problems...

So...I troubleshot according to your last email, which seems to confirm the strangeness of my predicament: getting an excellent link about 4 feet away from the router, but still can't get online (the same errors resolving the domain name). For the record, I also ran the test without the frequency and additional parameters. Also, I am using the latest version of Feather. I still can't help think that I've managed to misconfigure the wireless setup; is there anything else I can check?

I managed to get the original Windows drivers for this card, so if we can't get it working, I'll try the ndiswrapper route. Thanks again for your knowledgeable help!


iwconfig yields:

lo no wireless extensions

eth0 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"First Floor" Nickname:"Jalopytosheeb"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point:<our address>
Bit Rate:11Mbs Tx-Power=15 dBm Sensitivity:1/3
Retry mins limit:8 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=92/92 Signal level=42/153 Noise level=107/153
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:681 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

ifconfig yields:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr:<our address>
inet addr:<assigned IP> Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
Rx packets:25 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
Tx packets:6 errors:1093 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
Rx bytes:4523 (4.4 FiB) Tx bytes:3368 (3.2 KiB)
Interrupt:3 Base address:0x100

It looks like the packets being sent are erroring... not sure why though.

Do you have an installation of Windows on your laptop? It would be nice to have another OS on there (non Linux) to confirm that the driver is indeed crappy :)

I'd go ahead and try to use ndiswrapper. The only wireless device I tried (WiFi USB thing), ndiswrapper ran the driver perfectly, so I assume ndiswrapper works well with other cards as well :)

If that doesn't work... I guess all I can say is try it under Windows, if that doesn't work then it's definitely a bad wireless card.

Simple test to tell if its a hardware/driver issue, or a DNS issue.


connect as usual.

Ping your router by IP address

Ping google by IP address 64.233.187.99

Ping google by name google.com


-If you cant ping your router, your nic is definatly not really connecting
-If you can ping your router, but cant ping google by IP or name, your default gateway isnt set up right
-If you can ping your router and google by IP, but cant ping google by name, your DNS isnt being set.
-If you can ping google by name, you have another software issue (web browser not set up correctly mabey)


*note* google has multiple IPs. try that one from your windows box first just to make sure its up.


Let us know the results of these tests, and good luck :)