Wireless laptop configuration problem

[William Chapman]

On 8/1/05, kleeman <ulist at gs1.ubuntuforums.org> wrote:
> 
> Wireless is still fairly primitive in linux. Hopefully this will change
> in the next Ubuntu release (breezy). In the meantime I have found it
> more useful to use cli commands from the wireless-tools package. In
> particular iwconfig is very useful (as is the more general ifconfig).
> In your case it looks like the madwifi driver is being used and is
> close to working. What do the following commands give:
> 

//snipped 

kleeman,

Thanks for your ideas.  I did what you suggested, the results follow. 
Let me know if I need to make any changes to the test setup and rerun.

Test setup:
    (1) both eth0 (wired) and ath0 (wireless) configured & active;
    (2) HOWEVER, eth0 wired Ethernet cable disconnected;
    (3) ath0 selected in System->Administration->Networking panel as
"default gateway";

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wjc at trotter:~$ sudo dmesg | grep ath
Password:
ath_hal: module license 'Proprietary' taints kernel.
ath_hal: 0.9.12.14 (AR5210, AR5211, AR5212)
ath_rate_onoe: 1.0
ath_pci: 0.9.4.12 (EXPERIMENTAL)
ath0: 11b rates: 1Mbps 2Mbps 5.5Mbps 11Mbps
ath0: 11g rates: 1Mbps 2Mbps 5.5Mbps 11Mbps 6Mbps 9Mbps 12Mbps 18Mbps
24Mbps 36Mbps 48Mbps 54Mbps
ath0: mac 5.6 phy 4.1 radio 4.6
ath0: 802.11 address: 00:09:5b:c4:0b:c6
ath0: Use hw queue 0 for WME_AC_BE traffic
ath0: Use hw queue 1 for WME_AC_BK traffic
ath0: Use hw queue 2 for WME_AC_VI traffic
ath0: Use hw queue 3 for WME_AC_VO traffic
ath0: Atheros 5212: mem=0x10800000, irq=9
ath0: no IPv6 routers present

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wjc at trotter:~$ ifconfig
ath0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:09:5B:C4:0B:C6
          inet6 addr: fe80::209:5bff:fec4:bc6/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:493 errors:25041 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:25041
          TX packets:595 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:199
          RX bytes:81801 (79.8 KiB)  TX bytes:212868 (207.8 KiB)
          Interrupt:9 Memory:c8ae0000-c8af0000

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:00:86:40:95:84
          inet6 addr: fe80::200:86ff:fe40:9584/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:594 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:594
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:201816 (197.0 KiB)
          Interrupt:9 Base address:0x1080

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:161909 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:161909 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:14789370 (14.1 MiB)  TX bytes:14789370 (14.1 MiB)

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wjc at trotter:~$ iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

ath0      IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:"vSystems"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.437 GHz  Access Point: 00:09:5B:C9:D5:00
          Bit Rate:36 Mb/s   Tx-Power:50 dBm   Sensitivity=0/3
          Retry:off   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=52/94  Signal level=-43 dBm  Noise level=-95 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:51578  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

eth0      no wireless extensions.

sit0      no wireless extensions.

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wjc at trotter:~$ sudo dhclient ath0
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.1
Copyright 2004 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/products/DHCP

sit0: unknown hardware address type 776
sit0: unknown hardware address type 776
Listening on LPF/ath0/00:09:5b:c4:0b:c6
Sending on   LPF/ath0/00:09:5b:c4:0b:c6
Sending on   Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on ath0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 8
DHCPDISCOVER on ath0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 15
DHCPDISCOVER on ath0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 16
DHCPDISCOVER on ath0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 10
DHCPDISCOVER on ath0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7
DHCPDISCOVER on ath0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 5
No DHCPOFFERS received.
No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.

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Eagerly awating your comments!!!  (I think I see some scary things in there!)

Many thanks,

Bill Chapman