SMC 2632w V2 PCMCIA Wirless Lan Card- HELP!

[thehyperintelligentslug]

Hello,

I have noticed a few posts on the forums on this broad subject but they don't really deal with my problem specificaly.

I bought one of these cards on Friday and after pulling most of my hair out over the weekend (i'm now 23 and bald), I have only had minimal success getting this card to do what it is supposed to!

Now, the SMC 2632w is nicely supported by pcmcia-cs, however the SMC 2632w V2 uses a completely different chipset (Atmel AT76C503A-based).

My first port of call was this website, which deals mainly with getting the the SMC released drivers working.

SMC released it's own closed-source Linux drivers, aside from the fact that they have to be tweaked to work with Wirless Tools, their libraries are compiled with gcc 2.xx and when I compile the modules with my gcc 3.xx compiler, they refuse to load.

So, thats the SMC ones out of the way, going to have no luck there.

On the page (above) I noticed 'RedHat 8.0' so I followed this link which deals with the atmelwlandriver project on sourceforge.

After a bit of hacking about (I grabbed the code from CVS), my card is now recognised by Gentoo and loads the pcmf502r.o module OK on plugin/boot.

When the card is plugged in, it tries to execute '/etc/init.d/net.eth0 start', which comes back with the error that it has already been started. A quick ifconfig or iwconfig shows this to be true BUT there is no IP address assigned.

My Access Point is a nice Netgear WAP which gives addresses out by DHCP. If I try to ask it for an address it times out.

I have the /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts set so my ESSID is correct, the mode is Managed/Infrastructure.

I have dissabled WEP for now just so I know it's not any kind of authentication problem (the only security is that my WAP is locked to my PCMCIA's MAC address).

So, in summary. The module loads fine and the card seems to be loaded OK, communication between the Gentoo and the card seems to be working, however the card isn't finding the Access Point.

I know this card will work as I have Wireless working in Windows XP, however that was just as a test as I do all my work in Gentoo.

Oh, I noticed this message on the atmelwlandriver-users mailing list, however changing the driver didn't seem to make any difference.

Any help at all would be gratefully received!
_________________
Cheers,

Neil.

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http://www.thehyperintelligentslug.co.uk

[snkmoorthy]

with my WiFi(Linksys Instant Wireless) card, I wrote a shell script with what you would put in the iwconfig command to set essid,wep..., copied it to /etc/init.d/wifi.sh and rc-updated it to run by default when the system comes up...

I know I can have the config in the wireless.opts, but where is the fun in THAT.

before you set out to do that, plugin the card, run iwconfig with essid and others and see if takes an address, may do a ifup after that.

never trust what you have in wireless.opts unless you can prove otherwise.

[CodeHacker84]

Hmm, I've had some trouble with wireless cards that don't recognize AP's. Of course, my card is a Prism2 chipset (totally different story), but I have found out that you have to have the proper encrytion mode set on your card in order to even get through (after three days of unsuccessful attempts, I felt extremely sheepish when I found that a little "iwconfig eth1 enc restricted" did the trick). Just another thing to make sure of. Oh, and with the /etc/init.d/net.eth0 problem...cardmgr from wireless-tools (I think that's where it's from...may in fact be pcmcia-cs) tries to automatically start net.ethx on boot, so that may be the deal there.
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[thehyperintelligentslug]

Thanks for the tips guys,

However after a good few days of playing around now, I am going to exchange the SMC for a Netgear MA401. This card is supported by pcmcia-cs (and by the kernel as described here).

It's not often I fly the 'white flag' like this but as much as I would like to get it working, for me and anyone else who is having similar problems, I don't really have the time needed to sit around and hack at it!

I will take on board your comments though, when I get around to configuring my new card!
_________________
Cheers,

Neil.

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http://www.thehyperintelligentslug.co.uk

[thehyperintelligentslug]

Just an update...

All is good, Netgear MA401 worked pretty much streight away...

...now I just have to get WEP working..!
_________________
Cheers,

Neil.

---
http://www.thehyperintelligentslug.co.uk

[sirhenry]

I had the very same initial problem. I finally got my SMC 2632W V2 working with the latest ATMEL-drivers by compiling the lates CVS by following the instructions http://www.chip.org/~alb/SMC2632Wv2.html

I also had to hack a file in the driver because of the CardServices version check (I commented out the checking).

To make my card communicate with the base station with DHCP (encryption is in fact OFF on the base station), i did the following commands (my card is eth1 as I already have another NIC).

/etc/init.d/pcmcia start (fails, because of dhcp-timeout)
iwconfig eth1 essid default
iwconfig eth1 enc 0000-0000-00
/etc/init.d/net.eth1 start

Now the card is up running. Whenever I run the wireless-script from /etc/pcmcia/wireless my card will not work. Even if I set the parameters as shown above. This might have to do with the order of the two commands. It is also very weird that I have to have an encryption key, although WEP-encryption is off (although blocked on MAC-adresses).

Well, it works as of now...

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Henrik
[url][/url]