Re: Thinkpad T20 wireless troubles - revisited

Sjoerd Hiemstra(shiems146@xxxxxxxxxxxx) is reported to have said:
In an effort to get wireless on my IBM Thinkpad T30 laptop working,
Wayne Topa wrote:
Sjoerd Hiemstra wrote:
The installer saw three connection systems in the laptop:
- wireless connection with interface wifi0
- wireless connection with interface eth0
- ethernet connection with interface eth1.
Odd enough, only eth0 worked, not wifi0 as one would expect.

Now we need even more info. Did you use the orinoco card to do the
install or was it eth1? I suspect eth1 might be an IBM internal
Wireless interface.

The installer used eth0, as far as I recall.

At a console prompt do

lspci -v

Be sure the orinoco in plugged in when you run that.
That will tell us what the Network interfaces are. They work in
windows so we have to find out what they are. We need the lines like
these from my T40.

0000:02:02.0 Network controller: Intel Corp. PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B
Mini PCI Adapter (rev 04)

0000:02:08.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corp. 82801BD PRO/100 VE (MOB)
Ethernet Controller (rev 81)

Relevant output of 'lspci -v':

02:02.0 Network controller: AIRONET Wireless Communications Cisco
Aironet Wireless 802.11b

02:08.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82801CAM (ICH3)
PRO/100 VE (LOM) Ethernet controller (rev 42)

(As a sidenote, there's no orinoco card; the OP had one.)

Most (all) IBM interfaces will work in Linux so you need to know what
modules have to be loaded before bringing the interfaces up.

From [1] I found that I probably need to do a 'modprobe airo_cs'.

Add the airo_cs to /etc/modules. ie 'cat airo_cs >> /etc/modules'
or put it in the interfaces file

auto eth1
interface eth1 inet dhcp
pre-up modprobe airo_cs
....
....
post-down rmmod airo_cs

Following the directions at [2], the entry for wifi0
in /etc/network/interfaces now looks like this:

iface wifi0 inet dhcp
wireless-essid <....>
wireless-key <....>
auto wifi0
allow-hotplug wifi0

If I do an 'iwlist wifi0 scan' then my AP is detected correctly (as
well as two neighbouring APs - interesting).

There is only one remaining obstacle.
The following messages appear if I do an 'ifup wifi0'.
They also appear after '/etc/init.d/networking stop' and then
'/etc/init.d/networking start'.
And they also appear if I do a 'dhclient wifi0'.

Prior to doing the ifup, what does iwconfig show?

I have 5 wireless interfaces set up on my T40. Some of them will not
come up if I do the 'iwconfig wlan0 essid "myAP"' _before_ I do the
'ifconfig wlan0 up'. It seems to depend on the different drivers but
the ifconfig works, here, for all of them.

So I have a small script that I use to bring
up which ever one I want to use. The script brings up all the
interfaces in the same way.

1. Bring up the interface using 'ifconfig <interface>'
2. Run 'iwlist <interface> scan'
3, Get which AP to connect to. (any) is allowed
4. Run 'iwconfig <interface> essid (answer from 3)'
5. Run 'dhclient <interface>'
6. Run 'ifconfig <interface>' (To show the connection is up.)

I also don't use WPA on my AP as I have the dhcp server set to allow
only our MAC addresses and have it set to assign static IP addresses
based on those MAC's.

We are very rural here. :-) Besides being only on dialup now.


wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
Listening on LPF/wifi0/
Sending on LPF/wifi0/
Sending on Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on wifi0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 5
DHCPDISCOVER on wifi0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 12
DHCPDISCOVER on wifi0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 14
DHCPDISCOVER on wifi0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 11
DHCPDISCOVER on wifi0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 12
DHCPDISCOVER on wifi0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7
No DHCPOFFERS received.
No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.

Something wrong with DHCP on the AP? My main computer works well with
it, through a wired ethernet connection.


Maybe. I used wireshark to capture the traffic to/from the AP to
troubleshoot connection problems.

:-) HTH, YMMV, HAND :-)

Wayne

--
I have a dream: 1073741824 bytes free.
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