Wireless problems.

Matthew Saltzman mjs at clemson.edu
Mon Jun 23 18:36:37 UTC 2008


On Mon, 2008-06-23 at 13:56 -0400, Mark Haney wrote:
> Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> > On Mon, 2008-06-23 at 11:53 -0400, Mark Haney wrote:
> >> Timothy Murphy wrote:
> >>> Mark Haney wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> I will mention that when I reboot, and I look in 'Network' in GNOME,
> >>>> that I see 2 wireless cards listed.  Originally, it showed 'wlan0' and
> >>>> 'wlan0.bak', along with 'eth0' and 'eth0.bak'.  I don't know how that
> >>>> happened, but I'm wondering if kudzu doing something.  Even when I
> >>>> deleted the wlan0.bak option and rebooted, same thing.
> >>> I think this is part of the completely crazy pre-NM WiFi setup.
> >>>
> >>> NM is crazy too, but in a different way.
> >>>
> >>> Did you try, incidentally, "iwconfig wlan0 essid <whatever>"?
> >>> Do you have the ESSID set in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0 ?
> >>>
> >>> Also maybe worth trying "iwconfig wlan0 MODE Managed" or "MODE AdHoc".
> >>>
> >>> Ps I'm not a WiFi guru, just a sufferer from it.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >> See, on my other wireless system (laptop running Gentoo), I always fire 
> >> up my wireless this way with no trouble, no matter where I am. (Uh, the 
> >> manual CLI way) The script I use has never failed me to launch iwconfig 
> >> and then bring up the interface.
> >>
> >> In Fedora, even from the CLI I cannot get the interface to connect. 
> >> It's UP, from the standpoint that I have an entry in ifconfig that tells 
> >> me it's up.  The modules are loaded (and I've tried load/unload).  I've 
> >> tried the other AP modes and still nothing. I just don't understand what 
> >> changed in a week.  This is the one system I haven't wired because of 
> >> it's location and so far I've not had trouble with it.
> >>
> >> At this point, I'm tempted to try Gentoo on it and see if that makes a 
> >> difference, just to make sure it's not some weirdness with Linux in 
> >> general with that card.
> > 
> > You might try the following:
> > 
> >       * Open system-config-network.
> >       * Delete all wireless interfaces and devices.
> >       * Reboot, and let the hardware detector re-detect them.
> >       * Try connecting again.
> > 
> > 
> 
> Yep.  Tried that too.  No go.  It's the craziest thing.

Did it get rid of the multiple copies?  Did it correctly detect the
cards?  

Do you have Windows on the machine, and does it work there?  Does the
Ubuntu or Knoppix live CD work?  I came late to the thread, so did it
work with older kernels?  Does it work connecting with
system-config-network, or ifup, or wpa-supplicant?

A that point, I'd consider filing a bug.  John Linville handles the
wireless stuff, and he's usually been pretty responsive.

Wireless is a seriously tricky business.  From what I've read here and
on the fedora-devel, fedora-testing, and NetworkManager mailing lists,
I'm not surprised that it's still kind of flaky on Linux.  It's gotten
dramatically better over the last couple of Fedoras, though.
-- 
                Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs




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