[conspire] Wireless setup help needed

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Graham Bird (graham at calbird.org):

> I'm trying to configure a Toshiba 4300 notebook with a Lucent Silver 
> wireless card running on Redhat 9.
> 
> The system is up and installed OK.  The card is recognized when I insert it 
> and can be configured (using the network wizard)
> 
> When I try to activate the card (using network config) I get an error 
> message:
> 
> Cannot activate network device eth0
> Error for wireless request "Set Mode" (8B06)
> SET failed on device eth0; Invalid argument
> Error for wireless request "Set Frequence" (8B04)
> Set failed on device eth0; Operation not supported.
> 
> Determining IP information for eth0... failed.
> 
> The access point is named and has encryption set.  I have entered both into 
> the wizard.  The card is alive (has a single light on).

When I had to solve this sort of problem with my laptop (not Red Hat),
its Lucent Gold card, and my wife's Apple Airport, I first verified that
"lsmod" shows the necessary drivers inserted by the PCMCIA /sbin/cardmgr
daemon:

orinoco_cs              4680   2 
orinoco                29568   0  [orinoco_cs]
hermes                  3296   0  [orinoco_cs orinoco]

(You should actually hear beeping when you put the card in, and then a
second time shortly afterwards when cardmgr matches the card's ID
against one of the entries in /etc/pcmcia/config .)

Anyhow, that much should make the device show up in /sbin/ifconfig's
output as an ethernet device[1]:

guido:/etc/pcmcia# /sbin/ifconfig 
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:60:1D:F1:DB:41  
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:478618 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:644997 errors:2333 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:100 
          RX bytes:158213926 (150.8 MiB)  TX bytes:97134288 (92.6 MiB)
          Interrupt:3 Base address:0x100 

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:9708 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:9708 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:3177900 (3.0 MiB)  TX bytes:3177900 (3.0 MiB)


At that point, all that remains is configuring the network device with
the correct network information.  Here's how I did it at home:

/sbin/iwconfig eth0 essid "networkname" key 0D64562506

(I've substituted a different network name and altered the network
password's hex value.)

If I were in your shoes, I'd attempt a similar approach of getting
things done manually, verify that you can ping something on the other
side of the link, and then you're mostly done, having proved that the
problem is solveable.  At that point, all you need do is
reverse-engineer how to enter the information correctly in "wizards" or
such-odd things.

[1] I think if you use some other (earlier? later?) linux-wlan drivers
than I use, it actually shows up as /dev/wvlan0, or /dev/wlan0, not
/dev/eth0 .

-- 
Cheers,                   The cynics among us might say:   "We laugh, 
Rick Moen                 monkeyboys -- Linux IS the mainstream UNIX now!
rick at linuxmafia.com       MuaHaHaHa!" but that would be rude. -- Jim Dennis