Wireless worked once, not now.

Forum: Networking
Topic: Wireless worked once, not now.
started by: Sparkytfl

Posted by Sparkytfl on Dec. 04 2006,11:09

My card is a motorola wn825g(v3), my laptop's a panasonic toughbook cf45 p2, and I'm a noob. Trying to use dsl3.1. Just running it off the cd testing and making sure it worked before trying an install.

Several hours ago I managed to get my card to work and connect to the internet. I was just messing around with stuff. I know among other things I used ndiswrapper at one point, but I don't remember telling it any specific commands or even putting in the driver's location. I just did something and it worked. But then I restarted the system.

Now I can't get it to work at all. And the power and link light on the card which were lit up nicely before when it did work, they're very dim now. I don't know if I broke the card somehow or what. I hope one of you can help me, or it looks like I'll be buying a netgear ma401 or something.

Posted by roberts on Dec. 04 2006,17:24

I am assuming the IP comes from a dhcp server.
I would suggest to boot with the nodhcp boot option.

Between trying and/or testing various Windows drivers, it is best to:

pkill pump

Otherwise the wlan0 device will be unavailable as pump is waiting for a IP.

Sometimes, I find I need a sleep command to allow time between commands before the pump command to insure that the card's driver has time to register.

Also, sometimes I find I need to "kick the pcmcia", i.e., I use the DSLpanel, PCMCIA tool, and click on reset button for the appropriate slot.

Posted by Sparkytfl on Dec. 04 2006,18:44

I can't seem to figure out how to enter multiple boot commands, so trying the nodhcp thing (which I'm not sure if I did right anyway, put "dsl no{dhcp}"), I couldn't use my fb800x600 and couldn't see a thing, so I can't tell what that did for the card, but it still didn't light up. I was able to try kicking it too, both last night and now, but no luck.

It detects my card as broadcom something in system stats pci. And I remember when I was first getting it to work, the lights were glowing brightly the whole time, now they never go above a faint glow.

Posted by roberts on Dec. 04 2006,18:47

fb800x600 nodhcp

Posted by Sparkytfl on Dec. 04 2006,23:39

hmm. I tried that in the other order and it did the nodhcp but not the fb. Well this doesn't seem to have any effect either. Still not lighting up.

I found this < http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....=wn825g > but I have no clue if it's the same problem, and don't quite understand the solution anyway. I don't understand this pump stuff at all, and I know I didn't do anything related to that when it did work.

Thanks for trying to help me, I hope you excuse my ignorance. I imagine it's pretty common.

Posted by roberts on Dec. 05 2006,01:09

All pump does is to request an IP from a DHCP server.
It is more common to be assigned an IP that to have a static IP.

Sometimes the netcard will be waiting for a response from an issued pump command. Then the netcard would ignore other commands.

Sometimes users have rebooted to be sure that the netcard is available when attemping to configure them. I have found that ususally only a kill of the pump command will free up the netcard.

I use pkill pump for that.
That command will stop the waiting for the response from the DHCP server.

Posted by Sparkytfl on Dec. 05 2006,02:47

Well, not sure what I was doing wrong before because now I just booted it up, opened wrapper, stuck "/mnt/auto/floppy/bcmwl5a.inf" into the first space, left the others the same, and it lit up and worked. I think I had the driver on my thumb drive before and it didn't like that.

So now it copied the driver into the other folder, I just need to set it up so I don't have to manually open wrapper and put in the "/etc/ndiswrapper/bcmwl5a/bcmwl5a.inf" every time.