network device confusion with usb wireless (wlan-ng)

[Bob Nielsen]

On Jan 27, 2006, at 12:01 PM, Matt Price wrote:

> hi folks,
>
> running on dapper with a self-rolled kernel, on ppowerpc (blue &white
> g3).
>
> having trouble with the linux-wlan-ng drivers and an ashton airdash  
> usb
> 802.11b adaptor.  after some work, I have it functioning, and can do
> certain things over the interface, e.g. pinging and sshing from  
> outside.
> THisi s after following the directions in the linux-wlan-ng README and
> also some from here
> ( http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-4041.html).
>
>  However, I don't see a way to get internal programs to use and
> recognize wlan0.  For instance, if I deactivate eth0 in network- 
> admins,
> firefox won't load anything, and I can no longer ping outfrom the
> machine.  There seems in anycase to be some kind ofwierd confusion
> between network-admins (the gnome network tool)
> and /etc/network/interfaces.  SO for instance, right now I have  
> wlan0 up
> and running, which is great, and ifdown thinks that eth0 is down.
> However network-admins tells me that eth0 is in fact still  
> "active"; and
> if I, e.g., diconnect my ethernet cable physically, all internet
> connections are lost.
>
> Soon this ocmputer won't have a physical ocnnection any more, so  
> here's
> whatI wantto have happen:
>
> - eth0 stay disabled.
> -wlan0 become default inet interface for all outgoing & incoming
> connections.
>
> I don't really care whether this behaviour is configurablethrough the
> gnome network interface or not, but I would like to have it work
> reliably.
>
> I'm happy to provide moredetail if anyone thinks that'll help.
>

If you don't want eth0 to ever be used, edit /etc/network/interfaces  
and comment-out or remove all reference to it.  It took me a while to  
get my wirelesss card working and I never did find the right  
incantation to set it up with a static IP and stuck with DHCP (since  
it is on a server, I configured my router to always assign the same  
IP to its MAC address so I could enable forwarding to that box).  I  
believe all the gnome tool does is create a (hopefully) usable  
interfaces file, so doing this with a text editor will surely work in  
any case.  Most (all?) of the graphical tools are there to make  
things easy, while the same thing can be done from a command line  
although it may take a bit of searching to determine what the entries  
should be.