Wireless configuration and startup - The Gentoo way (part 2)

hyperboloid · n00b Joined: 09 Nov 2004 Posts: 1 Location: Chicago

Hello.

I recently installed the new 1.11 baselayout and wireless works fine, but the wired network connection has stopped working. My network interfaces are eth0 and eth1. Before switching to the new baselayout both worked just fine, and eth0 pointed to the wired connection and eth1 pointed to the wireless. Now when I start eth0 I get wireless (but eth0 used to point to the wired connection!) and when I try to start eth1 -- nothing.

I have looked at the scripts and it is not clear how it is determined whether the interface is for wire or wireless. In fact, there does not seem to be any information on how to configure one's wired networking with the new scripts. Anyone have any advice on this?

This is on an IBM Thinkpad T41 with the 2.65 kernel. Both net.eth0 and net.eth1 are symlinked to net.lo and I'm using DHCP for both. Here's the (verbose) output from trying to start eth1:

instauration · n00b Joined: 07 Apr 2004 Posts: 12 Location: Kent, Ohio

Before I emerged baselayout-1.11.6-r1 today I had 1.11.5. As mentioned previously, to get my HP zd7000 broadcom wireless to work at boot-up and have init services with 'need net' as a dependancy also start I found that NOT adding net.wlan0 with rc-update was the way to go. Now that I've just emerged baselayout-1.11.6-r1 things are different. `rc-update add net.wlan0 default` is required to get things working smoothly. I'm using ndiswrapper-0.11 (which is loaded in /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6) and gentoo-dev-sources-2.6.9-r3.

Still having problems with vmware-config.pl after emerging vmware-workstation-4.5.2-8848-r2. Sometimes sets up bridged networking to /dev/vmnet0 and NAT to /dev/vmnet8, sometimes not.

moonlight · Posted: Thu Nov 11, 2004 9:24 am Post subject:

Hi all,

This post is mainly intended for Uberlord himself, but anyone interested in issues with some Medion Laptops, please read further.

After using Gentoo Linux for a while on my old desktop pc, I bought in November 2003 (indeed about a year ago) a Medion Laptop MD 40100. Installing and using Gentoo was fine, after a while I decided to configure my wireless card on Gentoo Linux since working wireless was much more flexible for me (before I was working wireless on Windows XP).

After following this thread, in order to learn more about wireless configurations, I have tried a few times to configure my wireless, but all those tries without success :cry:

. Finally I contacted Uberlord himself, spending a whole evening on this subject, ... resulting in 'no wireless' on my laptop. This had nothing to do with Uberlords knowlegde (please read further).

Since about 3 months I swapped from Gentoo Linux towards Debian Linux (I am not starting a discussion which distro is preferable), however I am still following the Gentoo Forums too, since I prefer to have the best of both worlds.

Again I tried a few times to get my wireless working, but the same story, ... still it didn't work.

However, yesterday I found on the web a nice explanation why it didn't work on my Medion 40100 laptop, ... even better, the solution is also described their, ... this solution is usefull for any distro using such kind of laptop.

So if people have problems with this type of laptops, please visit http://home.conceptsfa.nl/~revdmeer/md40100/index.html , the trick described their works :lol:

. So after about a year, I am finally running wireless on Linux.

Uberlord, it's maybe worthwile to mention this in your readme file.

Cheers Moonlight

Bushmann · Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2004 4:33 pm Post subject:

Hi, I'm using the wireless-script, and it's working really well for the locations I've been using. But now, I wanted to use the wireless network of the local university, the ESSID of which is "dukath-mv". The problem seems, bash isn't able to handle "-" as a part of varnames, so I always get errors trying to execute the wireless.sh script.
I'm no expert at bash, but is there a possible solution to this problem? Or are ESSIDs with "-" just not supported?

Chaosite · Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2004 8:12 pm Post subject:

UberLord · Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2004 9:46 pm Post subject:

Bushmann · Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2004 8:08 pm Post subject:

@chaosite escaping doesn't work, since it's a bash varname and you can't use any '\' in a varname ^^

I'll try the method with '_' again but I'm not sure it'll work, but thanks for the tip.

Something else: When I'm activating the preferred_aps and then try to connect to an access point not included in this list, it just tries to force using the first ESSID of the list, although I didn't activate preferred_only...

Last but not least: Sometimes the script just fails to connect to the AP. When I tryit again it mostly works, but it's a bit annoying always having to log in as root or to remove and insert the pcmcia-card ^^ is there a way to make the script try again in case of failure?

thx

UberLord · Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2004 9:17 pm Post subject:

moby · n00b Joined: 17 Dec 2002 Posts: 29

First off thanks for all the hard work. I've got this working on a newer laptop trying to get it to work on an older one.

Question: The old laptop has a RangeLan-DS card (orinoco_cs driver). The card lights up when put in, but I see nothing when I run iwconfig. My guess is that "RangeLan-DS" isn't defined in the pcmcia config file. It used to be wireless.opts or /etc/pcmcia/config.opts or something. Does this file or an equivelant exist?

I've gotten this card to work in this laptop with other Linux distributions (Mandrake 10, Fedora Core 2 etc..). I usually have to edit that config file to get the card recognized. I'm finally getting around to moving it over to Gentoo.

Thanks for any advice

-moby

MrStaticVoid · Posted: Thu Nov 18, 2004 6:04 am Post subject:

To all the people using the dirty workaround for madwifi scanning:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=5966999&forum_id=33958

A solution at last (a simple one at that). Hopefully Jean Tourrilhes will have it in for the next wireless-tools release, but until then manually editing the code works and is easy.

This is a good day for me! I finally got suspension and 3d acceleration with the binary ati-drivers working without freezing, and I get a clean solution to the scanning issue.

yangman · n00b Joined: 28 Aug 2004 Posts: 57

I'm uisng iwpriv_ath0="mode 3" and it seems to work with no problems at all connecting to both my .11g network at home and .11b network at school. The preup() workaround is not used.

UberLord · Posted: Thu Nov 18, 2004 9:53 am Post subject: Re: Old pcmcia card

UberLord · Posted: Thu Nov 18, 2004 9:54 am Post subject:

whschwartz · Posted: Fri Nov 19, 2004 11:51 pm Post subject:

I'm having trouble getting my stuff setup right for wireless.

My goal is to setup 3 or 4 different ESSID's (home, work, friends, dad's) and set the preferred set to home.

Currently I'm trying just 1 to get that right and when I have wep turned off and just 2 lines in my /etc/conf.d/wireless it works but I can't get WEP to work.

my wireless file looks like

UberLord · Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2004 7:16 pm Post subject:

computerkammer · n00b Joined: 22 Nov 2004 Posts: 5

Hi!
I had downloaded the scripts from uberlord's website and just copied everything to the folders.
Maybe that's my problem now.....

I have two entries in etc/conf.d/net:
----------entries-----------------
ifconfig_eth1=("192.168.1.23 netmask 255.255.255.0")
routes_eth1=("default gw 192.168.1.1")
-----------------------------------------------
Then I'm starting manually: ./net.eth1 restart
I get no connection... but have entries in the "wireless" file
With the two commands:
------commands----
iwconf eth1 essid blabla
iwconf eth1 key --mykey--
-------commands end-----

the card works fine.

What to do that it works on startup.
Or better howto make that he reads "wireless"???
Just 2 days on gentoo

Thanks for help

UberLord · Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2004 8:45 pm Post subject:

computerkammer · n00b Joined: 22 Nov 2004 Posts: 5

Hi Uberlord!

Thankyou for all....

Runs on the first test....

Just remove the scripts on your homepage...costs me 11 hours wasted time.

image · n00b Joined: 03 Apr 2004 Posts: 17

is it possible to make it so if i connect to a certain ESSID, i can specify a certain mac address to spoof?

i tried this in /etc/conf.d/wireless

mac_ESSID="00:11:22:33:44:55"

and it didn't work as i thought it would.

UberLord · Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2004 5:49 pm Post subject: Re: essidnet and macchanger

whschwartz · Posted: Wed Nov 24, 2004 9:36 am Post subject:

I'd like to get my wirelesss file setup so I can connect to say 3 different networks depending on where I'm located.

home
work
linksys (lots of motels use this)

home and work use WEP, the linksys one doesn't

So far in my wireless file I have

UberLord · Posted: Wed Nov 24, 2004 10:30 am Post subject:

Klavs · Guru Joined: 22 May 2002 Posts: 536 Location: Denmark

Hi,

I've just upgraded to baselayout-1.11.6-r1 - and I see the wireless-ebuild scripts still have one big problem AFAIK

I have a USB-wireless device on my server (no more pci-slots- small server) - this wireless device can only do ad-hoc mode - which however works fine.

I need the script to default to my home wlan (ie. to adhoc mode) and be able to fallback to Managed mode if default fails. AFAIK it seems these:
# Set the mode of the interface (managed, ad-hoc or master). Managed is default
# If it's ad-hoc or master you also may need to specify the channel below
#mode_eth1="ad-hoc"

# If managed mode fails, drop to ad-hoc mode with the below ESSID?
#adhoc_essid_eth1="WLAN"

should have be reconstructed so one can also choose the fallback_mode.
_________________
Best regards,

Klavs Klavsen
Denmark

Working with Unix is like wrestling a worthy opponent.
Working with windows is like attacking a small whining child
who is carrying a .38.

tautology · n00b Joined: 08 Jan 2004 Posts: 8 Location: Canada

Hello,

While I think that the goals strived for with the new "Gentoo way" of wireless configuration, I think that it is WRONG to break all the machines that use wlan-ng by not providing a simple setting to override the new spiffy automagic way. Don't get me wrong, I have wanted something like this for some time and even thought about getting down to writing a solution, but making it impossible to turn off the new iwconfig tools only configuration is just asking for a large number of frustrated users.

Anyways if I have overlooked a method for using my wlan-ng way of doing things that for years has "just worked" please let me know and I will be happy to use that method. For now, I do not have the time to play around with ndiswrapper or wait for wlan-ng to support iwconfig. I will just have to be contented with downgrading baselayout, or manually running dhcpcd.

BTW:

UberLord