Wireless -- Linksys WMP54G v.4 with rt2500 driver

[jmtuley]

Hey,

Anyone have luck with the RT2500-based WMP54g v.4? I tried ndiswrapper with no luck -- it would never come up with I did the usual iwconfig/dhcpcd routine, but would (and this is really bizarre) occasionally randomly come up if left alone for an unknown period of time. (I discovered this by not doing anything to it for a couple days.) Then I found out about the rt2500 module, and emerge'd it . Now the card appears to associate with the access point (at least, it has all the appearances of doing so -- iwconfig shows the correst SSID, WEP-128 key, AP MAC address, transfer rate ...), but I can't get an IP out of DHCP. I'm posting this from another machine (Thinkpad R40, with a Cisco Aironet 350) that *is* connected through wireless. Thus I know that it works, just not with this card.

Additional info:
AP is actually a Linksys WRK54G (little brother of the WRT54G, I think -- came in a box with a WPC54G PCMCIA card), connected to a Linksys BEFSR11 router. (And yes, it is configured correctly, with a static IP of its own, no NAT, and DHCP handled by the eth router instead of the 802.11 box.)

Problem card is in an old Pentium II 450MHz box my dad had lying around. Kernel is 2.6.9-gentoo-r9. This machine is really old, and I'm only hanging on to it to turn it into a router. The hope is that with an 802.11g card and two ethernet controllers, it can connect via the wireless to the "main" home network to serve a mini-cluster in a far-off room of the house (basically, act as a wireless bridge). Then, when I go back to school in the fall, it will actually act as the primary router for my four-node network.

Any suggestions on making the rt2500 work? If not, I may buy a new machine (maybe one of the Cappuccino boxes with the in-built wireless card), but that would be far more expensive than recycling this old and unused system.

Thanks!
--John

[aderby]

Have you tried setting a static IP address?

[jmtuley]

Yes, I tried a static IP address just after writing the original post, actually. ifconfig reported that it maintained th address, and I was able to ssh to the new address from another box on the network, but when I stopped eth0 it went down.

Which was confusing: ifconfig reported the address to belong to ra0 (the wireless card) but actually associated it with eth0?

Anyway, bottom line is that did not work, at least the way that I tried it.

Getting a static IP instead of dynamic is just fine; this machine will always be at home so I DHCP is not much of an issue; it's just how I have my network configured since I'm lazy.

Thanks for the suggestion!
--John