Help with wireless laptop setup

[revoohc]

I need some assistance with how to properly setup my wireless card. I have no problem getting the card to work, but would like to get a better setup running.

I have two wireless networks I cannect to (home and work). Is there a way to have gentoo determine which network I am in and auto setup it up (I can provide the keys)?

Also, depending on if I am docked or not, my wireless jumps between eth1 (undocked) and eth2 (docked). How can I cleanly get the system to handle this? Before, I have had some ugly hacks with the net.ethx scripts to get this to work.

Thanks,

revoohc

[FreeFly42]

See this thread for information on how to auto identify and configure the wireless settings.

I've had the same problem as you with the network card numbers. It always struck me as a serious flaw in the networking schemes in Linux that the kernel dynamically assigns the eth id's, but the configuration scripts have to be hard-coded (ie in the name of the file). I solved it initially hacking some scripts so that whenever any network interface was brought up, the script would check the MAC and rename the interface something much more meaningful (dock, laptop, wireless, etc) using the 'ip' command. This was really ugly. I solve it now by using wlan for all my network cards.

For a PCI NIC I think you could use hotplug to make sure the device is brought up how you want. There is a great deal of information in man hotplug, but I can't sort through it for you at the moment.

For PCMCIA cards it's easier since you can edit the network.opts file and have it load a configuration based on the MAC and/or on a pcmcia profile, which is really what you want.
_________________
Kent

Planes are dangerous, get out of 'em quick