Network settings lost and broken [solved]

[Guest freddie]

Hi, I'm running Mandriva 2007 spring on a phillips laptop, kernel 2.6.17-14, and I'm having persistent troubles with my wireless network. I set it up using the native linux drivers (ipw2200) after install and it worked fine. After rebooting it didn't connect automatically but after setting up the connection again (through the mcc) we could tell it to connect. After each successive reboot the card doesn't work, and even after reconfiguring the connection it usually still doesn't, to the point where I'm using a cable! Using ifup eth2 fails before acquiring an ip address (our router's running DHCP and the connection knows this).

 

 

Please someone tell me how to sort this out! I'm completely stuck with this... a fresh install is my fallback, but I've migrated from windows to avoid that sort of thing.

 

Cheers,

Freddie

[SilverSurfer60]

Sounds like your network service is not set to run at boot time. A check in mcc->system->services should tell you. Just make sure there is tick in the On Boot box.

[Guest freddie]

Sounds like your network service is not set to run at boot time. A check in mcc->system->services should tell you. Just make sure there is tick in the On Boot box.

 

Thanks for your reply surfer. I've checked and both network and network-up services are marked to start at boot, but the network-up is stopped and starting does nothing (I'm relatively new to linux so I'm not sure which service is which. I suppose network-up is the process which manages the connection once it's up and running, which I know isn't happening!). Even when I configure the connection from scratch (with the same settings, as I know they used to work!) and tell it to start the connection now I get no connection.

 

Also, I realised this is in completely the wrong section, so I've started a new thread in the networking section.

( https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtop...st&p=327946 ). If you think you can help me please could you post there instead? Thanks. Sorry if this wasn't the right thing to do.

Edited September 2, 2007 by freddie

[iphitus]

Also, I realised this is in completely the wrong section, so I've started a new thread in the networking section.

( https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtop...st&p=327946 ). If you think you can help me please could you post there instead? Thanks. Sorry if this wasn't the right thing to do.

Don't worry. I tidied it up. I deleted the dupe and moved this to network as it has responses.

 

Welcome to the forum, i'm sure someone will be able to help. In the meantime, see if anyone else has had the same problem by searching.

 

James

[SilverSurfer60]

The next thing you can do is run dmesg in a console and look for entries relating to your network connection. If you're not sure what to look for post the output and we can take a look. You shouldn't need to re-install ;)

[Guest freddie]

The next thing you can do is run dmesg in a console and look for entries relating to your network connection. If you're not sure what to look for post the output and we can take a look. You shouldn't need to re-install ;)

 

(Thanks for tidying that up iphitus. I've searched around a few times and couldn't find anything which sounded the same, although that doesn't mean that I didn't come accross the solution!)

 

Okay surfer, dmesg gives

 

...

ieee80211_crypt: registered algorithm 'NULL'

ieee80211: 802.11 data/management/control stack, git-1.1.13

ieee80211: Copyright © 2004-2005 Intel Corporation <jketreno@linux.intel.com>

ipw2200: Intel® PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, 1.1.2kmpr

ipw2200: Copyright© 2003-2006 Intel Corporation

ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:02:09.0[A] -> Link [LNKB] -> GSI 10 (level, low) -> IRQ 10

ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection

ipw2200: Detected geography ZZM (11 802.11bg channels, 0 802.11a channels)

eth2: NETDEV_TX_BUSY returned; driver should report queue full via ieee_device->is_queue_full.

ieee80211_crypt: registered algorithm 'WEP'

Installing knfsd (copyright © 1996 okir@monad.swb.de).

...

 

(plus loads of other stuff which didn't look relevant). It mentions WEP at the end while our network uses WPA (and we reset it to use WPA every time, only to have this forgotten). This is pretty much meaningless to me so any help interpreting this stuff would be much appreciated.

[SilverSurfer60]

The answer appears to be the wpa settings as you say. I'm sorry but I don't have the solution but I'm sure there will be someone along soon that can resolve this for you.

[Greg2]

It mentions WEP at the end while our network uses WPA (and we reset it to use WPA every time, only to have this forgotten).

Have you installed wpa_supplicant from the repos?

[Guest freddie]

Have you installed wpa_supplicant from the repos?

 

I assumed so as the connection has worked in the past, but I'll check when I get back tonight.

[Guest freddie]

Have you installed wpa_supplicant from the repos?

 

I've checked and I already have it; v0.5.7-1.2. Thanks for the suggestion though.

 

It does let me attempt to connect to the network after selecting WPA (PSK) but then it's usually forgotten and set itself back to WEP after a reboot. It also sometimes changes the operating mode back to managed (we've tried all of them, but it worked with this setting to begin with), although it always remembers the SSID and password.

[Guest freddie]

As I was having no luck with the native drivers I tried ndiswrapper, but I had issues with that crashing the interrupt handler and couldn't get much further (I could change the way in which it crashed, but that wasn't really what I was looking for!). So I did the dirty nasty trick of a clean reinstall and all's well with the native drivers. Still no idea what it was, but I thought I'd let you know I'd given up with that configuration. Thanks for all your help anyway.

 

Freddie