orinoco mystery
Forum: Networking
Topic: orinoco mystery
started by: wes33
Posted by wes33 on Nov. 23 2004,22:36
I'm brand new to dsl. I have an old pentium 133 with32 mb memory. DSL works great on it (I am amazed).
So now I want to try to get my orinoco silver wlan card
working..
When I insert the card into the pc slot DSL automagically
loads what seem to be the right modules (orinoco,
orinoco_cs, hermes). Iwconfig sets the essid and key
with no complaint. ifconfig brings up the card with
proper ip and netmask.
The little green light goes on, on the card.
But I can't ping the network. There is just no response.
Ping reports like: nn signals transmitted, none received.
But there is no flashing on the transmit/receive light during
the pinging.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Posted by ke4nt1 on Nov. 23 2004,23:13
You can try the command ' pump -i wlan0 ' from a root shell..I don't have the orinoco card, but I have several others.
From what I can read in your posts, your inserting the card
after the OS is booted..
What happens when the card is already in the computer
BEFORE you boot it up ?
73
ke4nt
Posted by caulktel on Nov. 24 2004,01:02
I have the Orinoco Gold card in my Pentium 133 laptop, and as long as I boot with it inserted DSL finds it and configures it fine. Try plugging it in before you boot.
Posted by wes33 on Nov. 24 2004,02:06
thanks for the advice; no luckthe pump operation reports failure
if I boot with the card inserted dsl finds it
but cannot bring it up (there is a message
during boot: ignoring unknown interface eth0)
I was able to get the windows drivers set up (in
windows 95 that is which is what's on this old
machine) and the card works in windows (chalk one
up for ms there)
I tried booting knoppix in text mode and got the same
results as in dsl (no surprise I guess).
It feels like it's close to working but I don't know
what to try next ...
Posted by caulktel on Nov. 24 2004,02:35
I get the same error, ignoring unknown interface eth0, but it still works for me. What laptop are you using? Mine is a Hitachi 4140x. Could be the differnce is in PCMCIA slots and drivers. Mine supports 16 and 32 bit cardbus cards. Do you get two beeps when it gets to the card manager stage, I do.
Posted by ico2 on Nov. 24 2004,09:59
what is the name of the device, ordinary network cards are usually configured as eth0, eth1 etc, i am not sure what the name of the wlan card would be. try ifup -a, it should start all network devices, then try to ping another machine on the network.
Posted by wes33 on Nov. 24 2004,12:04
the machine is an acer extensal 390 (pentium 133).As I said, the card works fine in windows, so there is
no hardware fault.
I get the proper beeps.
the interface can be brought up as eth0 manually
so that ifconfig and iwconfig report everything as
fine
but no network activity happens
(if there was another small linux that would boot on
this machine I'd try to see if this was knoppix/dsl
related but I don't know of any -- the other live cds
I have seen need at least 128 mb to boot)
thanks for the advice and if you've got more, I need it.
Posted by ico2 on Nov. 24 2004,16:58
ifup -a?
Posted by ico2 on Nov. 24 2004,16:59
welcome to the forum btw 
Posted by dallas7 on Nov. 24 2004,18:45
If you're using a WEP key and your access point is not set to "open" or "both" you probably need to enter the "key restricted" in iwconfig. Run netcardconfig and when you get to the one where you enter your WEP key, stop at the NEXT one which is something like "enter additional parameter for..." type inkey restricted
just like that, no quotes, dashes, equal signs.
Then just continue until netcardconfig finishes.
You can also do it using the iwconfig command line. Something like
iwconfig wlan0 key restricted
Sorry I don't have my DLS box with me to jog my memory. I done it so many times now, it's all rote for me.
But you seem to be pretty savvy so it should be a no brainer for you. Let us know if that works.
It's unfortunate that the Linux world has not yet developed a unified TCP/IP-WiFi front end. If your NIC isn't recognized by netcardconfig, you wouldn't believe what you have to do to set it up. Something as simple as pointing to your default gateway and DNS servers is a throwback to the MS-DOS TCP/IP stack.
Don't get me started on the lack of hardware drivers for stuff that isn't two years old or thrown together by code anarchists.
Welcome to Linux. If you like sticking your feet in piles of hot coals, you'll love it!
Posted by wes33 on Nov. 25 2004,03:15
sorry no luck with the key restricted trickit seems obvious to me (i.e. it's probably wrong) that
I should see the send/receive light flicker with every
ping signal (this is what happens when the card is
working).
by the way, I booted up dsl on the acer extensa's
big brother (acer travelmate 734, p3-600). I manually
set the wireless parameters with iwconfig and manually
set the network parameters with ifconfig.
everythings works perfectly -- right down to seeing the
flicker with each ping packet and of course all networking
works fine.
there must just be something screwy with the acer extensa's
pcmcia (though, as I say, the wireless card works fine in
windows -- probably lucent did something special in the
windows drivers for the card in windows 95 ...)
oh well ... thanks everybody
Posted by akuma6099 on Dec. 22 2004,02:46
I too have ran into this problem on my vaio. A simple yet effective method would be to make a little shell script that sets up your wep key before the "pump -i wvlan0 or eth0" is executed by cardmgr. instead, I just do a "ifconfig eth0 down", setup the key, and a "pump -i eth0". yes I'm lazy but I'm also still a newbie since I've played with linux off and on 
the lazy way out:
#!/bin/bash
case $1 in
start)
echo "Bringing down orinoco...."
ifconfig eth0 down
echo "Setting Key...."
iwconfig eth0 key ababababab
echo "Bringing it up now....."
pump -i eth0
;;
*)
echo "Nothing to be Done here"
;;
esac
Throw this little script in /bin or wherever and make a symbolic link in your /etc/rc5.d/ folder.
root@box:/etc/rc5.d# ln -s /bin/fixme S30fixme
now it'll do it for you while you boot up. stupid yet simple..... I'm learning still
Posted by asz on Jan. 19 2005,20:29
Having exactly the same problem.I have a Compaq armada 1750 and the Orinoco silver (8461-02). I run DSl 9.2.
The silliest thing is, I had it working!!! Then one day, zip! No more! Right in front of me!
Cardctl ident gives me "Atheros Communications, Inc" "AR5001-0000-0000", so the ath_hal.o and ath_pci seams right.
When doing a "ifup ath0" the card blinks and you can use iwlist to see ap, signal strength and so on. After 30 sec. the prompt gives me "Operation failed" (from pump?) and the card stops blinking.
I Put my DHCPD in debug mode, and the server gets the DHCP-request, and send an offer... which never arrives! #¤"%¤#"¤%
This drives me half mad... please help!
Posted by asz on Jan. 19 2005,20:36
Posting followup....Tried the same card in my "worktop", HP NX7010, SuSE 9.2 and it did the same thing... Is the card broken?
Also, when saying DHCPD and SERVER in the above post, I mean my estate server, another machine, on the other side of an NETGEAR 814 wireless router.
Posted by asz on Jan. 20 2005,11:05
Okey, I got it working again... I must say it is definitly _not_ a scientific solution, but it worked, now liten to this:A little about my environment helps understanding. I have a server for infrastructure (firewall, dhcpd, web, automation and other). It is a debian woody, solid as a rock!
At my attic i have a wireless router/switch wich I use only as a wireless accesspoint (switch <=> wifi). WAN port is not connected.
First time the orinoco card stopped working, I had a power outage. So the wifi router (NETGEAR MR814 v2), restarted.
The only card affected was the orinoco a/b silver (8461-02) and in linux only (ath_* drivers?). The same card and computer, running XP, worked.
P*ssed med off really. So I gave it three days fiddeling. I upgraded my router software from 5.03 to 5.3, reset it and... nothing! I saw that my server got the DHCP request, that made me think firewalls. Made a guess that the router was interacting even if the traffic not was going though the wan port. Tried disabling the SPI firewall, and whooops, the orinoco got online. Strange is that re-enbling the firewall did not shut the orinoco out again.... Don't laugh, this is what happened. Or?
If anyone have another explanation, i will be more than happy to accept. But it is another last grasp to check for. Also disconnecting the router from the rest of the net and running the routers dhcp server, did not solve anything.