Trouble setting up wireless card - MA311


Forum: Networking
Topic: Trouble setting up wireless card - MA311
started by: Winterhart

Posted by Winterhart on Feb. 28 2006,23:23
I've an older computer (Pentium MMX 166, 3gig hard drive, mostly ISA slots, the works) which works like a dream and which I'm really hoping to make into a little print & fileserver.  However, I'm having trouble setting up my wireless card (a fairly crucial part, as I'm running low on the number of additional cat5 cables I can string across my bedroom...).  The card is a Netgear MA311, which although it's definitely on the "works out of the box" list in the wiki, doesn't seem to be detected anywhere that I look.  There's an ISA wired NIC in the computer in addition to my IDE card, and ifconfig -a only turns up lo and eth0...which I presume is the ISA card.
I saw a reference to 'wlan0' here on the forums, but `ifconfig wlan0` just gives me 'device not found' errors, and wlan0 isn't found anywhere in dmesg.
I've never set up a wireless card from linux before, much less on a Debian-based system, so I'm a little lost.  Is there anything that I can do to determine whether or not the card's even detected?

EDIT:
I just discovered the 'iwconfig' command (who knew? *headdesk*) and the card shows up there seemingly just fine.  So there goes the question about whether or not it's detected...however, the other still remains:
What do I do to help that card get an IP?  'dhcpcd' doesn't seem to exist on this system, so I'm still at sea...

Many thanks!

Posted by roberts on Feb. 28 2006,23:53
pump -i eth0

You could also use the control panel and the iwconfig button for simple prompts that include the pump command.
As well as the creation of a custom script with your settings called myiwconfig.sh in /opt

Posted by Winterhart on Mar. 02 2006,05:49
Works like a charm now, thanks so much!
Posted by Winterhart on Mar. 03 2006,01:41
Shoot, I spoke too soon.  What I think it picked up yesterday was someone's random insecure network in my building, rather than using my settings to connect to my own network.
I'm not having much luck with iwconfig, mainly (I think) because it wants a WEP key, and I use WPA-PSK.
How would I go about configuring that, do you know?

Thanks!

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