I am having some trouble configuring a newly acquired belkin wireless
network card. I have it working but it is a kludge and I don't know why
it works so I would like some advice.

I have sorted the kernel module (rt2500.o) and I have added modprobe
wlan0 to the end of rc.modules tp load it. It loads ok and I can
ifconfig to my heart's content but it won't connect to my wireless
router. I ran netconfig to set up dhcp but the client dhcpcd does not
seem to get run. Running from the console does nothing but await the
timeout.

route shows just the local loopback.

However, by accident I discovered that if I ran kwifi and configured the
card to look for my router in infrastructure mode, then if I run dhcpcd
wlan0 everything works. route shows that dhcp has made the necessary
connections.

OK I can do this manually every time but I don't understand what it is
that kwifi is doing. Obviously there is a step I am missing somewhere.
Can anyone help?

Cheers

Ian

workshop wrote:
> I am having some trouble configuring a newly acquired belkin wireless
> network card. I have it working but it is a kludge and I don't know why
> it works so I would like some advice.
>
> I have sorted the kernel module (rt2500.o) and I have added modprobe
> wlan0 to the end of rc.modules tp load it. It loads ok and I can
> ifconfig to my heart's content but it won't connect to my wireless
> router. I ran netconfig to set up dhcp but the client dhcpcd does not
> seem to get run. Running from the console does nothing but await the
> timeout.
>
> route shows just the local loopback.
>
> However, by accident I discovered that if I ran kwifi and configured the
> card to look for my router in infrastructure mode, then if I run dhcpcd
> wlan0 everything works. route shows that dhcp has made the necessary
> connections.
>
> OK I can do this manually every time but I don't understand what it is
> that kwifi is doing. Obviously there is a step I am missing somewhere.
> Can anyone help?
>
> Cheers
>
> Ian

For anyone suffering from a similar problem I found the fix. You need to
use iwconfig to set up the card essid and mode. Follow this with
ifconfig wlan0 up to get it running and finally dhcpcd wlan0 to get the
dynamic IPs. I simply added this to rc.local and it works from boot.

Whew.

Ian

On Thu, 16 Feb 2006 22:18:24 +0000, workshop wrote:

> For anyone suffering from a similar problem I found the fix. You need to
> use iwconfig to set up the card essid and mode. Follow this with ifconfig
> wlan0 up to get it running and finally dhcpcd wlan0 to get the dynamic
> IPs. I simply added this to rc.local and it works from boot.
>
> Whew.
>
> Ian

Do you have to configure the essid and mode every time you reboot, Ian?
--
Chick Tower

For e-mail: aols . sent . towerboy AT xoxy . net

By the way, this card really sucks. I have it for linux, where it can be
configured with difficulty but on windows - no hope. Youd be better sheeling
out for soomething using the atheros chipset instaed of the ralink one.

Me! wrote:

> By the way, this card really sucks. I have it for linux, where it can be
> configured with difficulty but on windows - no hope. Youd be better
> sheeling out for soomething using the atheros chipset instaed of the
> ralink one.

I have a Belkin PCI card which uses the ralink 2500 chip set and it works
fine on both windows and slack. Windows install was straightforward - load
the code, fit the board and off it goes.

Under slack I uses ndis wrapper, a iwconfig line in rc.inet1 and a call to
dhcdcd in rc.local (and I only did it that way because ndiswrapper sets the
device to wlan0 rather than eth0.

Dual boots to win98 and slack 10.1 on a modest K6/500 no problem. Model
number is F5D7000



Ian