I have been playing around with automating bringing my wireless card online at boot. As I read in an earlier forum post, this should be done with rc.local

I successfully have the daemon for the card itself loading at boot via rc.local.....but when I add things like:

modprobe ipw3945
iwconfig eth1 essid XXXXX
iwconfig eth1 channel 10
iwconfig eth1 key XXXXXXX
ifconfig eth1 up
dhcpcd eth1

-- all of which gets me online seamlessly after I've logged in -- but during boot I get the message: eth1 device does not exist.

Any idea how to fix this?

As a temporary fix, I've written a script to do all of this for me after I've logged in, but I can only run it as root...yeah, I'm [still] a noob.

Put the network parameters in /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf. The inet1 script is written so that everything will happen in the correct order - you won't be trying to run a command against an interface that doesn't exist yet.

Put the modprobe call in /etc/rc.d/rc.modules (a soft link to your current modules list).

Since there are not enviroment values set at that time (like PATH) you've to write the commands with full path, like: /sbin/modprobe ipw3945

As 2Gnu said, there are already files created to set up modules and network stuff at boot. But it's up to you to choose which one to use, freedom

Cool. I'm trying this idea out. I tried 2Gnu's instructions but they didn't work...but then, I didn't provide the full path for my iwconfig stuff. I did for my modprobe because all the samples contained the path.

Thanks, both, for the advice. I will post results........

modprobe is working fine; confirmed with lsmod.

the rest of it is not working; i have a feeling i am just entering the info in the wrong format.

Here is what i put into my rc.inet1.conf file:

The first five lines were there already and I..obviously..hadn't a clue what to do with them. So I just added the commands I knew worked elsewhere and hoped for the best....but I have a feeling this was not the correct way of doing this.

Do I need to format this differently or use different syntax?

Thanks..

have you looked at rc.wireless.conf ? and rc.inet1 yet? you can set all that stuff up in there.


it sounds like you tried this out whilst already booted up? (I'm guessing) but when you reboot udev is likely not labeling your wifi interface 'eth1' (perhaps wlan0).

Thanks, bioe007.

I just looked at rc.inet1 and realised that rc.inet1.conf is feeding data into it, so I think I will spend some time tonight reading thru rc.inet1 and rc.wireless and try to figure out what information goes where, and try to fill it all in appropriately. After looking at the scripts themselves I have a feeling that I know the information I need, I just need to learn where to put it.

Anyway, I got the modprobe working so that was worth the post. Thanks everyone for your helsp

OK, I got it working; and while the following information may be old news to the pros, I felt like I should document how I reached my end result for people who are as clueless as I am::

Added to /etc/rc.d/rc.modules under "Other network hardware drivers:"
/sbin/modprobe ipw3945

The default /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf looked like this:
INFO="Any ESSID"
ESSID="Any"
;;

And so I changed it to read:
INFO="Any ESSID"
ESSID="XXXXXX"
KEY=XXXXXXXXX
;;

These changes essentially knocked out the need to do all of my iwconfig settings that I mentioned in my original post (above). But in order to get online, I found that I still had to type in
ifconfig eth1 up
dhcpcd eth1

So I compared "ifconfig" results while not online to my "ifconfig" results while I was online. The difference was that whilst online, my ifconfig revealed my inet addr, Bcast, and Mask. And whilst not online, the line containing that information was missing.

To fix this, I opened /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf and - sure enough - noticed that my eth1 configs were empty. So......

I just added into the template rc.inet1.conf provides my:
IPADDR (ip address)
NETMASK
and changed USE_DHCP="" to USE_DHCP="yes"

Reboot. And I'm online automaticaly.

A huge thanks to 2Gnu, gbonvehi, and bioe007

Hope this helps someone else in the future......

Hi,

Just a comment. You could have run 'netconfig' from a console/cli as root to configure your network. This will produce the /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf' file.

Check some of the references in 'Slackware LQ Suggestions!'.

Yeah, thanks. I did that, actually, but somehow I screwed it up because my rc.inet1.conf file had my IP and Netmask in the eth0 slot rather than my eth1 slot. I'll have to try it again just to see what I did wrong.

Thanks!

Hi,

You can edit '/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf' with any good text editor. I use 'vi'. Just make sure the changes you make are the ones you want!

Restart the 'inet' with '/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 restart' from the cli.