Wireless card problems with DHCP and WEP

Forum: Networking
Topic: Wireless card problems with DHCP and WEP
started by: bigpilot

Posted by bigpilot on April 12 2006,16:12

I have a RT2500 wireless card for which I compiled a module and which seems to work fine. Problem is: I still can't connect to the ADSL router and my card isn't receiving any IP address, somehow the DHCP isn't working. When I do 'ifconfig' the 'ra0' card doesn't show an IP address. There is a bytecount for the 'RX bytes' and 'TX bytes' so something seems to be happening.

I've set my ESSID, (wep)key and channel manually through 'iwconfig' but nothing seems to happen, no IP address is acquired.

Any idea why my card can't acquire an IP address?

Posted by bigpilot on April 12 2006,18:47

I have a feeling there's something fishy going on here. When I type in the command:

ifup ra0

I get:

Ifup: ignoring unknown interface ra0

When you load a network card driver module, should a interface automatically appear (ra0 in my case)? I think I added mine by doing:

ifconfig ra0 up

It didn't really appear by itself.

Posted by bigpilot on April 12 2006,20:00

Ok, i'm starting to figure this out now. There are actually TWO ways in Linux to get it working, and I only have partial knowledge of each:

1) one can issue a 'ifconfig ra0 up' command which will add the interface to the system. It will only work if there's a network driver loaded with the right 'alias' in it (for example 'eth0' or 'ra0'). So if this command works, then you have a valid network driver loaded.

Now this is where my knowledge ends since I don't know how to get the card to get a DHCP address from a server using 'ifconfig' commands. Anyone know this?!

2) You can use the 'ifup ra0' and 'ifdown ra0' commands but before you do this you first need to add the 'ra0' interface to the
/etc/network/interfaces file.

Thing is, since it's a wireless card I'm configuring, I also need to add the essid, channel and wepkey somewhere but I don't know in WHICH files? Anyone know?