MadWifi wireless experiences
 

Hi all,

So I was setting up a friend's laptop yesterday, an Acer Aspire AS9504WSMi (courtesy of PCWorld), which has a wireless chip on its motherboard that uses the madwifi driver. She (my friend) bought a brand new D-Link router with built-in wireless access point yesterday so I set about getting the laptop to talk to it and the internet. These were some of the issues I ran into and I am wondering whether some would qualify as bug reports to Mandriva. The O.S. version installed on the laptop is 2006.

1. A problem arose when setting an encryption key (WEP) on both the router and laptop. I first used drakconf (ease of use) to set the wireless encryption key and this said it worked fine and iwconfig showed it had been added. However, no connectivity could be established.
Okay something not taking hold...
Checking /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ath0 showed that the WEP encryption key had been included under the varialble WIRELESS_ENC_KEY. However, /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-wireless uses the variable KEY for setting the WEP key hence using just drakconf the key is not set. I changed ifcfg-ath0 to just KEY rather than WIRELESS_ENC_KEY and this solved the problem.

2. When trying to originally establish comms, I used the wired network port for config. Thus, this was enabled and had the same IP address as the wireless card. This needed to be changed so I edited /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 and changed it then saved the file and restarted the network. Everything worked so to check, I rebooted.
On the reboot the eth0 card showed the IP address had returned to the original wireless IP address, which is entertaining when 2 cards have the same IP address!!
Looking in drakconf, it showed the original IP and had updated ifcfg-eth0, undoing my edits.
Changing the IP address in drakconf solved this and the IP address is now something different but what other files is it going to alter to make the IP permanent?

3. Despite the ONBOOT=no variable being set, eth0 is still determined to start on boot. When the /etc/init.d/network is restarted though, it does not come up, which points to some other script / process kicking off eth0. Any thoughts appreciated.

Many thanks for your time and patience.

Regards

The Phantom