Wireless is Pain

Qylvaran · n00b Joined: 28 Jan 2004 Posts: 74

I have a DWL-G122, and I am using the rt2x00 driver. The driver appears to work, and I can get the 'lnk' light to come on on my usb dongle. The 'act' light even blinks when I try to do something. I cannot, however, connect to the internet with the thing. I can't even connect to my router's configuration menu. What follows is a copy/paste of my actions from login and setup to ping.

dgaffuri · Advocate Joined: 05 Jun 2005 Posts: 2078 Location: Italy

May you please post ifconfig -a output and /etc/resolv.conf? It seems that the wireless link works, except that it doen't report link quality, signal level and noise level. Which is the IP of your router?
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Qylvaran · n00b Joined: 28 Jan 2004 Posts: 74

from ifconfig -a:

dgaffuri · Advocate Joined: 05 Jun 2005 Posts: 2078 Location: Italy

And you can't ping 192.168.0.1 using wireless?
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Qylvaran · n00b Joined: 28 Jan 2004 Posts: 74

Nope, I cannot.

dgaffuri · Advocate Joined: 05 Jun 2005 Posts: 2078 Location: Italy

That's rather strange. Are you sure you're connecting to the right AP? May you please post

Qylvaran · n00b Joined: 28 Jan 2004 Posts: 74

jamapii · l33t Joined: 16 Sep 2004 Posts: 637

I just noticed something in the iwlist output. On my system, it says Mode: Managed. Either you are in Master mode, i.e. the laptop is trying to be an access point, or the iwlist output isn't well-defined (you never know). Did you never try the Gentoo-specific way for WLAN setup? This will do all the necessary things like that.
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I had similar problems with ndiswrapper. At some time it started working for no apparent reason. (after I tried a GUI configuration software)

I just put in /etc/conf.d/net

Qylvaran · n00b Joined: 28 Jan 2004 Posts: 74

Argh! Now I can't even get the lights on the thing to light up anymore. I think I'm suddenly less far along than I was yesterday. So far I've been trying to get things working without writing anything into /etc/conf.d/net, since I wanted to make sure I could set everything correctly with iwconfig. I tried putting the settings you mentioned into it, but it said it couldn't associate with an access point. Iwlist still lists my router, but iwconfig says "Access Point: Not-Associated" no matter what I do.

Could you post a link to instructions for "the Gentoo-specific way for WLAN setup" please? I can't find any such thing on gentoo.org. Maybe I need to make a fresh start of it.

Also, I have set the card specifically to mode: managed, and sometimes mode: auto, but it still has mode: master in the iwlist readout. I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean the laptop is trying to be an access point.

Finally, I do not have permission to change any of the settings on the router. If it is determined that this wireless dongle won't work, however, I can take it back and get a different one. If anyone has a tip on a miracle foolproof wireless adapter that works without even trying on gentoo, I'm all ears.

dgaffuri · Advocate Joined: 05 Jun 2005 Posts: 2078 Location: Italy

It's the AP that's in master mode, not your card

Qylvaran · n00b Joined: 28 Jan 2004 Posts: 74

Yep, it works on freaking windows. Grr.

jamapii · l33t Joined: 16 Sep 2004 Posts: 637

Qylvaran · n00b Joined: 28 Jan 2004 Posts: 74

Weirdness. I set my conf.d/net to this:

jamapii · l33t Joined: 16 Sep 2004 Posts: 637

It's possible that dhcp won't work, even if everything else would. You can try a static ip:

config_default=( "192.168.0.105/24" )

Seeing that any subsequent try doesn't work, this may be a limitation of gentoo's init scripts. They might fail in all cases if they see a "half-initialized" device. You can try some iwconfig lines to disassociate or you can reboot.

Another possibility is that the driver doesn't really associate, even if it says so. That's what driverloader (the commercial alternative to ndiswrapper) did.

BlackLodge · Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2006 11:51 am Post subject:

Hello!

Only to be sure, can you show the output of route command? Because if you are associated, you have a valid IP and the ping to the AP doesn't work, it's maybe only a routing problem...
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drjones69 · n00b Joined: 13 Dec 2005 Posts: 9

Just a thought, your router (from iwlist output) has encryption turned on, but you iwconfig seems to have it turned off - have you definetly got the key set up in (I think!) /etc/conf.d/wireless - the file is somewhere around there.

Also, try setting a static IP and netmask to match your router (ifconfig wlan0 etc), and once you can ping the router the only thing that could be wrong is the routes (post output of route, run as root) - I know they can be a pain, I'm tempted to go back to wired, but it's nice to have them working!

Sorry I can't be more help now as I'm as a work at the moment, will look into further when I get home.

Ryan

frenkel · Veteran Joined: 13 May 2003 Posts: 1034 Location: .nl

rt2x00 driver is still experimental. Try the rt2500 driver (in portage also) first, if that one works, you know the rt2x00 driver isn't ready for you yet.
I even think the rt2x00 driver doesn't support encryption yet.

Qylvaran · n00b Joined: 28 Jan 2004 Posts: 74

Thanks for your help everyone (and I did try the rt2500 driver, didn't help), but I gave up. Exchanged the DWL-G122 for a DWL-G650 and it works fine, no questions asked.