Hi all,
I'm having weird problems getting my Netgear WG511 pcmcia wireless adapter to work in one particular wifi hot-spot. My card uses the prism54 driver and works perfectly at work. This is on Mandriva 2006 and I am NOT using ndiswrapper. It has become extremely difficult to establish a connection although the network control applet and iwconfig and ifconfig can see the network, it apparently fails to get a useful DHCP responce. With a few *hours* of messing with it, basically resetting everything numerous times and generally farting around with it, it eventually comes up and stays up (I'm using it now). Extremely frustrating, especially given that it worked flawlessly with Fedora 4.

kernel messages are not particularly enlightening (to me anyway)

dmesg:
eth0: islpci_close ()
eth0: resetting device...
eth0: uploading firmware...
eth0: firmware version: 1.0.4.3
eth0: firmware upload complete
eth0: interface reset complete
eth0: no IPv6 routers present

typical /var/log/message entry:
Jan 22 17:35:03 LT0 drakroam[24344]: running: /sbin/ifup eth0 daemon
Jan 22 17:35:04 LT0 ifplugd(eth0)[24525]: ifplugd 0.28 initializing.
Jan 22 17:35:04 LT0 ifplugd(eth0)[24525]: Using interface eth0/00:09:5B:92:E0:C6
Jan 22 17:35:04 LT0 ifplugd(eth0)[24525]: Using detection mode: wireless extension
Jan 22 17:35:04 LT0 ifplugd(eth0)[24525]: Initialization complete, link beat not detected.

or:

Jan 22 17:28:38 LT0 net_applet[5364]: running: /sbin/ifup eth0 daemon
Jan 22 17:28:42 LT0 dhclient: DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 6
Jan 22 17:28:48 LT0 dhclient: DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 6
Jan 22 17:28:54 LT0 dhclient: DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 8
Jan 22 17:29:01 LT0 net_applet[5364]: running: /usr/sbin/drakroam
Jan 22 17:29:01 LT0 drakroam[22443]: ### Program is starting ###
Jan 22 17:29:02 LT0 dhclient: DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 1
Jan 22 17:29:03 LT0 dhclient: No DHCPOFFERS received.

Does the above give any ideas or any clue as to where the difficulty originates? What was different in Fedora 4 to make it work so much better at the same hot-spot? What other information might be useful to track this down?
Thanks very much,
- 105659