configuring PCMCIA Wireless card Ubuntu 5.04

David david at kenpro.com.au
Wed Aug 31 01:53:04 UTC 2005


On Tue, Aug 30, 2005 at 06:23:39PM -0400, Deep Thinker wrote:
> Hello All,
> 
> I have posted this before, but haven't found an answer yet. Wireless
> is the only connection possible for this system due to physical
> restraints so I kinda need to get it going.

I had lots of problems but finally got it working reliably. I've posted 
this solution to this list before, but it sounds flakey even to me! 


> I have 2 possible cards I can choose from
> 
> 3Com PCMCIA (3CRPAG175)
> Linksys Dual Band A+G (WPC55AG)

My card is Netgear (atheros chipset). Does that matter? I don't know.

> For the 3COM ...
> under SYSTEM>ADMINISTRATION>NETWORKING the card is listed and the
> station says "The interface ath0 is active." I have put in my ESSID
> and my 128 bit encryption key. The card is blinking and looks like it
> is trying to do something. But I cannot connect to the Internet or any
> local resource.

what sort of blinking? Alternative left and right on the Netgear means 
it's searching... blinking in sync means it's found a network and 
connected.

> 
> The output of iwconfig Shows my Access Point MAC address as
> FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF (which we all know is incorrect).

This was the symptom I was getting. Everything else including output of 
ifconfig looked good.

> 
> I cannot turn off the encryption on the access point, since I am at
> work and that would be too risky.
> 
> 'dmesg' shows
> 
> IPv6 over IPv4 tunneling driver
> ath0: no IPv6 routers present
> 
> My router is running DHCP and all internal IPs are 10.1.1.?
> 
> I am stuck. What should my next troubleshooting step be? Where can I
> go for more info on how to solve this?

the following may not be your problem, but it's worth a look.

For reasons I could never figure out, it turned out that I needed to 
activate ethernet before wireless would work. I have no idea why, and I 
don't actually ever use the ethernet. 

What I've done is use the gui tool to set up both eth0 and ath0. If I 
watch the boot messages during startup, the wireless card starts searching 
for a network during the "hotplug" startup, but doesn't actually sync onto 
a signal until the "network" startup is completed.

Then the problem is that networking has two default routes, so any packets 
going out on the network get completely confused and networking fails. To 
fix this, I do this in a root terminal:

#route del default dev eth0

after which everything works reliably. I'm still doing this on my laptop. 
I don't know why it works, but it does. To make it easier on the non-geek 
folks who use this laptop, I've put a script in /etc/init.d/ that runs 
just after networking startup so it all happens automatically.

I'm sure that eventually somebody will point out how silly this all is, 
but it works, and nothing else does, so you might like to give it a try.

David




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