Mandriva 2006 Ndiswrapper problem with Belkin

[Guest GK 2006]

Hi

 

I am setting up a machine to use wireless broadband using Mandriva 2006 free and a belkin 125g wireless pci card (using the BCM4318 chipset - calls itself Air Force One and is pci revision 02). The model number on the card's box is F5D7001uk.

 

So far I have tried different versions of the drivers and different versions of ndiswrapper (currently at 1.11).

 

The situation now is that the card is recognised - wireless utils such as wifimanager etc all say the card looks good. In the Monitor Connections window it shows as connected to the router (netgear Dg834gt) with a strong signal at about 11mbps.

 

The problem is that whenever I open a browser (mozilla or epiphany) the browser can open - but once it accesses the web it will show a status bar approaching 100% saying dowloading image from .. . and at that point the system hard locks. The same happens when I try and ping the router - seomteimes on the first line of ping return and sometimes on the 3rd/4th line.

 

I have moved the card to a different slot (its a poweredge 2500 with different voltage pci slots) and problem remains. One time it accessed the web fine for about 2 mins before locking the system.

 

I have deleted both eth0 and eth1 (via gui) and turned off most processes from starting at bootup (including acpi apci and samba/nfs etc).

 

I have a feeling that this is a very simple setting that I have overlooked which causes it to hard lock like that. Iwconfig looks ok to me as does ifconfig -a. This machine is generally rock solid and the only times I have ever seen it lock is in relation to wireless connection.

 

Ifconfig shows eth1 /0 as no IP - sit0, l0 and wlan0 with its inet6 address and its ip address.

 

During bootspash there is a message about not being able to flush ipv4-6 route something - this machine was originally sharing a internet connection with a mandriva laptop via ethernet cable (laptop wireless).

 

The router has had its firmware upgraded - and meant to say that all of the above is with nothing else connected to the router - also its been rebooted a few times throughout all this too.

 

If anyone has any suggestions to resolve this it would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks.

[Qchem]

Welcome to the boards!!

 

It's hard to be 100% sure, but I'd wager that it's the driver ndiswrapper is loading that is causing the lock up. Have you used the ndiswrapper database to search for your card (via the "number" you get from lspci), to check for working drivers?

[Guest GK 2006]

Hi Qchem,

 

Thanks for the info - I did try that at some point (I think ndiswrapper refused to accept it was the correct driver for the card) - since then I am on a different verison of ndiswrapper/diff version of the .inf driver file.

 

I was pretty tired at the time of doing the above so could easily have made a mistake. When I get home I will to re-try the above and probably start over from scratch.