No luck with orinoco from pcmcia-cs, or from kernel.

OdinsDream · Veteran Joined: 01 Jun 2002 Posts: 1057

--- See update below ---

I'm having quite a time setting up PCMCIA, and an orinoco wireless card I purchased.

If anybody has some suggestions, I'd love to hear them, this is giving me quite a headache...

Per the suggestions in the FAQ, and in various threads around here, I started by disabling PCMCIA/CardBus support in the kernel. I also took out the Wireless references in network devices.

The ebuild for pcmcia-cs says to leave Wireless (non-ham) active, but do not pick anything beneath it. I did as it described.

I recompiled my kernel with these new settings, and rebooted the system.

emerge pcmcia-cs went just fine. I then did rc-update add pcmcia default and rebooted the system again.

I now get errors at startup that complain there is no pcmcia driver in /proc, and I'm given the suggestion to compile PCMCIA support in to the kernel.

So, that's ONE route.

The other route is when I compile support in, and I get as far as having iwconfig give me card information. I try and set the ESSID with success, and then use the /etc/init.d/net.eth1 start script to try and grab a DHCP address...

...but that just times out.

I can't for the life of me figure out what I'm doing wrong. Is the second method incorrect, though? Should i be chasing the first method?

int1 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 08 Nov 2002 Posts: 139

What brand of network card are you using? You might try the wlan-ng drivers. They work very well for me.

int1

OdinsDream · Veteran Joined: 01 Jun 2002 Posts: 1057

I've got an Orinoco Silver card. Lucent Technologies is written on the antenna.

OdinsDream · Veteran Joined: 01 Jun 2002 Posts: 1057

Alright, I must have done FAQ # 11 in the wrong order. I retried it now and everything's working much better, although I'm still having trouble.

I've got my modules.autoload file set up to load the things pcmcia-cs makes available. I've put cardmgr -f into my local.start file as well.

Now when I reboot, I get no errors, except when it starts to bring eth1 up.

I'm sitting right next to the base station during this process, so I'm sure the two devices are within range. I always get hangs on DHCP.

I've tried setting ESSID to "any" with iwconfig as well as just "", and the actual network name, "LIBRARY".

I've turned off all WEP encryption, and iwconfig confirms that the card is not trying to use encryption.

It seems like I've gotten all the drivers loaded correctly. The lights on the card itself do flash on and off when I issue these commands.

OdinsDream · Veteran Joined: 01 Jun 2002 Posts: 1057

Maybe I'm doing something wrong here. I tried the wvlan_cs drivers as well as the hermes.conf file (which caused my card to be detected as being from a different vendor). I'm not sure that I'm doing this right. Should the /etc/init.d/net.eth1 script be executing on card insertion / removal? (eth0 is for the onboard nic..)

ronmon · Posted: Sun Nov 17, 2002 12:33 pm Post subject:

PCMCIA network cards, wired or wireless, do not use the scripts in /etc/init.d.

You can set your options in /etc/pcmcia/network.opts and /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts. When you insert the card, it should automatically run /etc/pcmcia/network start if the card is identified properly.

OdinsDream · Veteran Joined: 01 Jun 2002 Posts: 1057

I checked in /etc/pcmcia/network and that script first sources the wireless.opts, and runs the wireless script..

..then it runs the /etc/init.d/net.eth1 script appending either start or stop.

I had to create /etc/init.d/net.eth1 by copying eth0 otherwise the cardmgr network script complained. Did I go about this step the wrong way?

I've even tried commenting out the eth1 start and stop portions of that script, inserting my card, and manually running ifconfig eth1 up and dhcpcd eth1.

All I get with any of these methods is both lights simultaneously blinking on the card once every 10 seconds.

rommel · Posted: Sun Nov 17, 2002 9:11 pm Post subject:

setting up the eth1 as you did was alright...atleast i have done the same with my orinioco card....but yopu do not want to add it to your default runlevel like you do eth0.
this allows it to be controlled by cardmgr -f and allows it to load the drivers for it at boot.
at boot you will see eth0 brought up and cardmgr starting but you wont see a referance to eth1.

OdinsDream · Veteran Joined: 01 Jun 2002 Posts: 1057

Neither of my interfaces are in the default runlevel. Since this is a laptop, I prefer to manually start and stop the interfaces, to lessen any delays that I could get from DHCP starting on an un-used interface.

You have an Orinoco card as well? Are you using any "hermes.conf" file, and what does your wireless.opts look like?

Should /etc/conf.d/net contain the line: iface_eth1="dhcp" or is this to be controlled elsewhere? (how is this related to the file /etc/pcmcia/network.opts?)

OdinsDream · Veteran Joined: 01 Jun 2002 Posts: 1057

I'm not sure what's going on here, it may be a module conflict. When I insert the card, it mentions loading ONLY orinoco_cs, but immediately afterwards, lsmod reveals much more:

rommel · Posted: Mon Nov 18, 2002 12:40 am Post subject:

well i didnt change anything from the defaults when i set it up.....i cant remeber exactly now. this system is running a linux router for my home network, i use a pcmcia card adn host adapter in a pc.....i live in a rural area and use wireless because there is no cable.

i used this post to set it up other then that i cant think of anything special i had to do to get it working.

i used the pcmcia-cs pakage , but thats all i can really think of...i will keep messing with that box adn see if anything comes back to me.[/url]

OdinsDream · Veteran Joined: 01 Jun 2002 Posts: 1057

When you set up your wireless.opts file, did you explicitly set your ESSID, or did you leave it blank, or set to "any" ?

More and more I'm thinking my problem may be the access point. Since everything else seems to load without error, and I get LED flashing on the card. Unfortunately, I don't have any specifications on the access points. They've already been set up at the college in various locations. I'm told the ESSID is "library", and that's about the only information I'm given.

Access point under iwconfig is listed as all 44:44:44:44:44:44 , I dont know why this is, but this never changes...

...is there a way to capture the wireless traffic, to see what's going on?

whoopwhoop · n00b Joined: 19 Nov 2002 Posts: 2

well, i was having the same problems you are describing here.

the way i fixed it is that i manually coded the encryption key into the config file (i know, i know). i had no luck using wepgen or whatever its called. also, you have to excplicity declare the essid.

you might want to try turning off encryption just to see if you can talk to the dhcp server (more or less just to show you your basic config works and to renew enthusiasm).

another thing, i have not had much luck getting my card to work with the kernel drivers so i used pcmcia-cs 3.2.1.

i hope this helps.

please email me if you have any questions at plainsane@mindspring.com

OdinsDream · Veteran Joined: 01 Jun 2002 Posts: 1057

Thanks for the tips. I'm still working on this problem. Although there should be no encryption on these networks, they're college-owned, so I can't directly check the configuration myself.

The AP's seem to be generic, and don't have any visible model numbers or identification on them.

One of the reasons I purchased this card was for the external antenna connector, and its ability to pick up a connection without having to explicitly set the ESSID. Is this impossible?

---

If I started by trying to use the kernel modules, then switched to pcmcia-cs, do I have to do anything special to make sure the kernel modules were deleted, and not accidentally still being used?

I've re-emerg'ed pcmcia-cs countless times with my new kernel configuration, but the lsmod output shown above makes me suspicious that something's wrong.

whoopwhoop · n00b Joined: 19 Nov 2002 Posts: 2

well, you should rebuild the kernel without pcmcia support (disable it no module or anything) also turn off support for portable network cards (cant remember the option name, its under networking). to ensure your not loading kernel modules and that you are using pcmcia-cs i would go into the modules directory and remove the pcmcia stuff under /lib/modules/linux-gentoo????/kernel/driver (i think thats the full path, im at work now and dont have my box to look at). do this after rebuilding the kernel because i think make modules_install will remove it anyways. once you have done this and you merge the pcmcia-cs package again, use prismstumbler. as long as the card is working (even if the link light is flashing) that program will show you all of the available access points that are broadcasting their essid (it will tell you everything you need to know except the security key). after that, if you still cant connect, its probably an encryption problem. use "airsnort" to combat this issue. oh make sure you have all the wireless tools installed.