wireless startup problem

drwilsontx · 03-12-2005, 01:05 AM

I have got my wireless card working and have been working on getting it to setup at boot time, I added the following lines to /etc/rc.d/rc.local-

iwconfig wlan0 essid "my essid"
dhcpcd wlan0

I get an error "no such device wlan0 device not found, SET ESSID failed no such device" (paraphrased), I login go to su type the same commands and it works fine. I removed the lines from reboot and login and try iwconfig again it fails the first time and works the second time. I have tried adding modprobe ndiswrapper and ifconfig wlan0 up in different orders, always the same fails the first time works on the second try.
I followed the instructions for ndiswrapper, make install,ndiswrapper -i NET8180.INF, modprobe ndiswrapper make sure it works and then ndiswrapper -m. I reinstalled slack 10.1 to make sure it wasn't something I had changed and didn't undo. Any suggestions would be appreciated

Armada 7400
Linksys wpc11 ver 4
Slackware 10.1

tormented_one · 03-12-2005, 02:43 AM

do you have to modprobe to activate the card? If you do then that needs to be first in the rc.local

jong357 · 03-12-2005, 08:41 AM

Why don't you just use the rc.pcmcia and rc.wireless scripts? Thats why they're there... Is it a cardbus?

tormented_one · 03-12-2005, 01:56 PM

Good question, I used local for a while and have been using pcmcia and wireless for a while now. Either way You can do the samething with both.

drwilsontx · 03-12-2005, 04:06 PM

tormented_one, I don't need to modprobe to bring it up, just iwconfig wlan0 essid xxxxx then dhcpcd, I already checked that no luck

jonga357- all the searching I have found here in the slackware forum and the network forum talk about using rc.local so I hsve nothing to go by to set up rc.wirelessor rc.pcmcia. As to wheter it is a cardbus or not I don't know it doesn't say cardbus anywhere on the card so I would assume it is not a cardbus all I know is that it is a Linksys WPC11 pcmcia card

jong357 · 03-12-2005, 05:58 PM

Well, cardbus=PCMCIA/LAPTOP basically. This isn't a wireless PCI card on a desktop, right?

Just edit /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf and Slackware will do the rest. I trimed my rc.wireless.conf down to just this:

Code:

VERBOSE=1

case "$HWADDR" in

*)
    ESSID="my-essid"
    MODE="Managed"
    KEY="my-encryption-key"
    ;;
esac

Then, if you have your router assign you an IP, just put "yes" under the eth0 device listing in /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf

Code:

# Config information for eth0:
IPADDR[0]=""
NETMASK[0]=""
USE_DHCP[0]="yes"
DHCP_HOSTNAME[0]=""

If you like to manually assign an IP, just leave the dhcp line blank and fill out IPADDR and NETMASK. Pretty simple in Slackware. I blacklist my ethernet module from loading at boot thru /etc/hotplug/blacklist because the 2 devices like to play musical chairs and it screws things up more often than not...

drwilsontx · 03-13-2005, 09:43 PM

I tried the rc.pcmcia and rc.wireless scripts, set the rc.wireless.conf to my essid and mode, then made sure rc.inet1 use_dhcp="yes" and it is a no go I still have to use iwconfig twice to bring up the card. as near as I can tell ndiswrapper is loading at boot but not setting up the wlan0 and is not available until after the first time wlan0 is used.

drwilsontx · 03-16-2005, 02:09 PM

It's a bit of a hack but it works, in rc.modules I added

modprobe ndiswrapper

then in rc.local I used,

iwconfig wlan0 essid myessid
dhcpcd wlan0

and now it works, still not able to use rc.pcmcia and rc.wireless.conf, but it works

tormented_one · 03-16-2005, 03:09 PM

you could put modprobe ndiswrapper in rc.local instead if you wanted

drwilsontx · 03-16-2005, 08:38 PM

I tried it there, several times, for some reason it never works, iwconfig wlan0 fails if they are consecutive lines.