First of all, I like Red Hat 8. I am a point and click man and am not interested in messing around with command lines, configuration files, compiling kernels, etc. I know most people here will slate me for this but I dont care.

However. can anyone help me get my Netgear MA401 wireless network card working (I use it in my desktop with a MA301 adaptor).

RH 8 does not seem to detected during install and I have tried adding it manually (via the network settings dialog) but with no luck.

Please help if you can - and please dont mention editing config files, compiling kernels etc

There is no point and click method I know of in order to get this card to work. Linux and its GUI configurators have gotten very good with ethernet, pppoe, modems, etc... wireless is still a little too close to the wild west.

Here's the commands, as root, to get your machine to recognize and configure the card, from what I can tell...

modprobe hermes
modprobe orinoco
modprobe orinoco_plx
iwconfig ethX essid NameOfTheNetwork
iwconfig ethX enc 123456abcd (if you are using encryption)
dhcpcd ethX

That is where the X is the device number assigned to the card. If there is no other ethernet card of any type in the machine at all, it will be eth0. If its the second device, eth1, etc.
These are the kernel drivers for orinoco, and just recently, prism2 cards (like yours). They are known to perform rather flaky, with the more reliable ones being from the www.linux-wlan.net group, but that's a huge clunking mess.

No matter what, getting wireless working is, for the forseable future at least, going to be a matter of getting your hands dirty.

Cheers,

Finegan

Hi,

I am also using the Redhat 8.0 distribution and I followed your instructions except I did not use DHCP but configured manually the IP adress, mask and gateway.

It allowed my MA301 to successfully ping the adress 192.168.0.1

However, several questions remain:
-How can I access the net ? For the moment mozilla always produces an error message (check the server name). Aren't there specific TCP/IP settings?
-When I use the iwconfig command the output says that my connection rate is 0M/s, while the connection is OK because it works under Win...

Thanks in advance,

Luc

The orinoco driver only works so well with the prism2 series cards, as well as right at kernel 2.4.18 there was an issue that the drivers that had made it into the kernel and the wireless extensions that made it into the kernel were at a mismatch. It'll probably be all sorted out by 2.4.20 and will definately be as solid as concrete by 2.6.x (we can all hope). No biggie, basically.

You're missing nameservers. There's about a hundred ways to add them in through a GUI, any nameserver will do, any at all on the internet (that is compliant with the RFC anyway), I keep forgetting to switch mine when I switch ISPs. If you want to just change them manually, edit the file /etc/resolv.conf and add a line like:

nameserver 123.123.123.123

Then it should be able to translate google.com into 216.239.51.100

Cheers,

Finegan

Hi,

thanks, it has changed things, now I don't have an immediate error, a "resolving www.googl.com" message is visible, but it does not go to the page: after a while an error displays "www.google.com cannot be found"... do you have any idea of what the problem is?

Alright, configure this from the ground up I guess, networking wise you always need 3 things:

IP address:

ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.2 up (the eth device was a guess)

Route to the gateway:

route add default gw 192.168.0.1

Nameservers:

echo "nameserver 123.123.123.123" > /etc/resolv.conf (which you've probably already done.

What does that turn out?

Cheers,

Finegan

I had already done the things you tell, but it still does not work. Here are the ifconfig, iwconfig and route displays I have:

IFCONFIG
eth1 Lien encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:30:AB:11:F0:27
inet adr:192.168.0.2 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Masque:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:14 errors:12455 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:11421
TX packets:0 errors:243 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 lg file transmission:100
RX bytes:784 (784.0 b) TX bytes:35250 (34.4 Kb)
Interruption:9 Adresse de base:0xe800

lo Lien encap:Boucle locale
inet adr:127.0.0.1 Masque:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:144 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:144 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 lg file transmission:0
RX bytes:13738 (13.4 Kb) TX bytes:13738 (13.4 Kb)


IWCONFIG

eth1 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"Wireless" Nickname:"localhost.localdomain"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.422GHz Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
Bit Rate:2Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm Sensitivity:1/3
Retry min limit:8 RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Encryption keyff
Power Managementff
Link Quality:0/92 Signal level:134/153 Noise level:134/153
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:1025 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:22 Missed beacon:0

ROUTE

Table de routage IP du noyau
Destination Passerelle Genmask Indic Metric Ref Use Iface
192.168.0.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth1
127.0.0.0 * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo


I really hope this will give you a hint on why I can't use the internet! Thanks a lot

Luc

Hi, after one night of work, I came to the following configuration, which seems better than the previous one (iwconfig displays a non zero link quallity...) but I still can't resolve host names.
I can nevertheless ping and telnet 192.168.0.1

IFCONFIG
eth0 Lien encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:30:AB:11:F0:27
inet adr:192.168.0.2 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Masque:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:73 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:4 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 lg file transmission:100
RX bytes:6108 (5.9 Kb) TX bytes:1584 (1.5 Kb)
Interruption:9 Adresse de base:0xe800

lo Lien encap:Boucle locale
inet adr:127.0.0.1 Masque:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:10 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:10 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 lg file transmission:0
RX bytes:700 (700.0 b) TX bytes:700 (700.0 b)

IWCONFIG
eth0 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"Wireless" Nickname:"Lucio"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.417GHz Access Point: 00:30:AB:19:B3:3B
Bit Rate=11Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm Sensitivity:1/3
Retry min limit:8 RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Encryption keyff
Power Managementff
Link Quality:12/92 Signal level:-90 dBm Noise level:-137 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

ROUTE:

Table de routage IP du noyau
Destination Passerelle Genmask Indic Metric Ref Use Iface
192.168.0.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
127.0.0.0 * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo
default 192.168.0.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0

Hmmm.....

Okay, your iwconfig looks fine, your route to world looks good, you do know that nameserver IP address I gave you, 123.123.123.123 was fake right? I just made that up as an example. Here's a real one:

nameserver 216.200.176.4

Cheers,

Finegan

Finegan,

In trying to setup my netgear MA401 I receive an error when I execute the command modprobe orinoco_plx

init_module: no such device

Is there some setup I need to perform before the modprobe and iwconfig?

I'm running RH 7.3 Kernel 2.4.18-10, pcmcia kernel 3.1.27-18

Any hints would be appreciated.

Michael

I've found out more about the MA401 over the past few... well, days, on two other threads and I don't think its a normal prism board. You could try:

a) going to http://ozlabs.org/people/dgibson/dldwd/ the source of the drivers and downloading and compiling the newest set and seeing if that version of orinoco_plx will work for you.

or, and I'll know these will work, but they're such a friggin headache:

b) the www.linux-wlan.net drivers, you've have to have your kernel source installed as well.

Cheers,

Finegan

Finegan,

I'm writing this to you from my wireless laptop

I went with the wlan drivers. It was not that bad, at least for installing.

There are redhat rpms at http://prism2.unixguru.raleigh.nc.us (wlan 1.15) for RH 7.3 and 8.0. As soon as I installed them my card (MA401) was recognized. After that I just had to configure the wlan-ng.opt file and setup my IP right.

Wireless is cool

The original poster may want to consider this method since it did not require source compiling.

I want to thank you for your posts. I would like to know what you consider the disadvantages of the wlan driver. Thanks again.

Regards,

Michael

I guess just as a follow-up...

Almost all of the other drivers for wireless devices, primarily Orinoco chipsets, sold as an add on with Dells primarily, and Symbol cards (marketted by 3com a lot before they ducked out of the wireless biz), use in-kernel support to modify the essid (network name), ecryption, blah blah, all on the fly through kernel wireless extensions. The linux-wlan project has been around since the dawn of man, and aside from being snide a lot on their mailing lists... which is really their own business, they decided not to backport their driver for wireless extensions... which I think they've actually gotten in there in the past rev or two, partially at least.

I was trying to get these to work back about a year and change ago, when I understood little about wireless, not nearly as much about Linux in general, and support for everything on the market (minus the Lucent/Orinoco cards), was very beta... closer to Alpha.

So I finally got their drivers to work, spent six to eight months under them, went through about 5 versions, and finally one day switched my Prism2 kit to Orinoco drivers and never looked back.

This was for my old house where I relied on a wireless link to a neighbor for my internal network. The linux-wlan drivers have come a long, long way since, and I guess my gripes are rather dated, but hand guiding a newbie through their compilation mess is always a headache, and on the linux-wlan site their RPMs are, or at least were, a few revs back and quirky in reliability at best. Orinoco is onboard and up until recently was a matter of downloading one little text file and sticking it in /etc/pcmcia.

I'll keep that link in mind for the future. I guess I'll have to get the linux-wlan drivers working again for the first time in forever.

There's the $.02

Cheers,

Finegan

Finegan,

Thanks for the follow up. Being new to Linux I appreciate the background you provided. This has inspired me to learn source and kernal compiling.

Michael

Well I got mine buzzing but no connection after loading the drivers as you did. How did you config after that?

Paul