Wireless woes

[Dustpuppy]

I've been given my brother's old laptop (see sig) which came with a Belkin Wireless Pre-N Notebook Network Card. This works fine under windows, and didn't have a problem in XP with connecting wirelessly to my router. I wasn't sure it would be easy to configure to use for a 2006 network install, so I installed Mandriva using an ethernet connection (which was fine), and then tried to install the network card.

 

After much googling, downloading and kernel-crashing I got to the following point. Ndiswrapper has been uninstalled and then the latest version installed from sourceforge. The NetAni drivers have been located on the XP partition and have been pointed to ndiswrapper. Ndiswrapper seems happy with this. The lights are on the wireless card, and the kernel isn't crashing. Modprobe.conf has been written as it should. I have an interface called "wlan0", and in the taskbar an icon tells me that the network is up on wlan0. Iwconfig gives me the mac address of my router (which I didn't input), signal strength and bitrate.

 

And it doesn't work. I can't ping anything either inside or outside the network, or the router (except 127.0.0.1). If I fire up Firefox it says it can't reach the host.

 

Please help!

 

The contents of both /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/wireless.d/Wireless and /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0 are:

 

DEVICE=wlan0

BOOTPROTO=static

IPADDR=192.168.0.6

NETMASK=255.255.255.0

NETWORK=192.168.0.0

BROADCAST=192.168.0.255

ONBOOT=yes

METRIC=10

MII_NOT_SUPPORTED=no

MS_DNS1=212.67.120.148

MS_DNS2=212.67.96.129

WIRELESS_MODE=Managed

WIRELESS_ESSID=wireless

WIRELESS_NWID=10

PEERDNS=yes

NETMASK=255.255.255.0

IPADDR=192.168.0.6

NETWORKING_IPV6=no

 

Does anyone have any suggestions?

[Guest Topaz]

What gateway are you using, if you haven't chagned it then it might be still trying to use the ip address of the ethernet port.

 

Try running "netstat -r", what do you get?

 

what does running "ipconfig -a" as root output?

[arctic]

Also check your security and firewall settings.

[ianw1974]

Also, as it's wireless, have you configured security on the wireless access point? If so, disable so it's completely open, and then try again and see if you get a response.

[Guest jglen490]

Sourceforge has a very good wiki site for setting up and configuring wireless cards under Linux. Take a look and see if this might help.

[Dustpuppy]

I've seen the wiki before - no help there, I'm afraid! I came across something similar on a Suse forum, though: the person resolved it by changing WPA security. What's that?

 

My firewall's off on the laptop, wep is off at the router and it's an open access point. My security setting on the laptop is "high", as done at installation, and I can't find a way of changing that in 2006 .

 

I've left the gateway the same as it was before - 192.168.0.1, which is the IP addy of the router. I've added GATEWAY_DEV=mac addy of the router (LAN side), but that hasn't helped. Is this what the gateway is with wireless?

 

ipconfig - isn't this a windoze command?

 

netstat -r gives

 

Destination    Gateway        Genmask        Flags  MSS Window  irtt Iface

192.168.0.0        *                255.255.255.0      U            0  0          0    wlan0

127.0.0.0              *                255.0.0.0              U            0  0          0    lo

default          192.168.0.1      0.0.0.0                UG          0  0          0  wlan0

 

One thing I've just noticed is that the logs are chock full of ndiswrapper errors of the sort

 

ndiswrapper    (NdisWriteErrorLogEntry:222):code 78855856

 

I have no clue what this means, and can't find anything by googling. Does anyone know what it means, and is it a problem?

[Guest Topaz]

>ipconfig - isn't this a windoze command?

Yes, I should have typed "ifconfig -a", my fingers thought they new better.

please post the result of that (run as root)

 

> netstat -r gives

Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags   MSS Window  irtt Iface

> 192.168.0.0         *                255.255.255.0      U            0   0          0    wlan0

> 127.0.0.0              *                255.0.0.0               U            0   0          0    lo

> default          192.168.0.1      0.0.0.0                UG           0   0          0   wlan0

That looks good. The default route is via the wlan0 interface.

 

What settings do you have for the device in mandrakelinux control center, esp the wireless connection panel?