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wireless card problems


Guest andydalgleish
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Guest andydalgleish

Hi,

 

I've just installed Mandrake 10 on my laptop (Sony Vaio PCG-9G5M) and am having difficulties getting my Orinoco Gold Wireless Card working (It's a Lucent Technologies PC24E-H-ET).

 

I let mandrake install it automatically and it chose the orinoco_cs driver. It seems to find one of the available access points (all the access points are configured to let my MAC address access the internet) which i can see if i use the iwconfig utility.

 

The main problem is that I can't access the internet (others can) and I can't see get any information about other access points when i try to use iwspy (my intention is to monitor and analyse the network coverage and signal strengths from every available access point). I'm guessing both these (internet and iwspy) problems are related, but have very little clue about linux. I'd appreciate any help greatly.

 

If you need more information or a better explanation then please ask.

 

thank you for any help,

Andy.

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Welcome to the forums! My guess would be that you need to toss the card some options using iwconfig, particularly the gateway. Something like `iwconfig wlan0 gateway 192.168.1.1` (I'm not totally sure about the syntax; man iwconfig to get it right.)

 

Then, once you have the card working, make a script: /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0. Put the arguments therein:

GATEWAY=192.168.1.1 etc.

and you're good to go every time you start up. :)

 

At least, this works for my Atheros card, hope this helps!

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your file will be called ifcfg-eth1 or whatever your device that shows up in ifconfig is. Put in that file not only the GATEWAY that Andrewski suggested, but also maybe GATEWAYDEV=eth1

(if of course that is your laptop's wireless device)

And restart the network with

 

service network restart

 

in a console as root.

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Guest andydalgleish
your file will be called ifcfg-eth1 or whatever your device that shows up in ifconfig is. Put in that file not only the GATEWAY that Andrewski suggested, but also maybe GATEWAYDEV=eth1

(if of course that is your laptop's wireless device)

And restart the network with

 

service network restart

 

in a console as root.

 

 

 

Thank you for the information, although I have yet to try this out (haven't been back to the lab where the wireless is) I have a few extra questions.

 

1. There is more than one access point in the lab, I've been told they are configured to automatically switch the user between them so they get the best signal. How will this work as i'm assuming they are seperate gateways and not just one as you seem to be suggesting?

And, if it helps, these access points are all Apple Airports, there are various different versions dotted around the lab.

is there not some configuration tool that selects what access point you want to use?

 

 

2. My intention for this wireless network card is to use it to monitor signal strength, link quality and noise for all the access points from various locations throughout the building, first of all using iwspy. When i add the MAC addresses of the access points to iwspy they are returned as having:

Quality: 0 Signal Level: 0 Noise Level: 0

but for the Link/Cell/AP row there is information there. This is the case even for the row which specifies the MAC of the access point (i know for sure that the MAC address for the access point it is 'connected' to is correct because it is show in iwconfig output), i would expect this line to show the correct information. i find this very odd as it makes me think my wireless card is not sending any packets to and from any access point. I'm worried that my card isn't going to be sending packets to every available access point and i won't be able to get the information i desire. This may all be related to the same thing but i'm not so sure. can anyone shed some light on the subject?

 

sorry for asking this before I have tested out any of your suggestions, hope you can shed some more light on the subject!

 

Andy.

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