Wlcardconfig
My wireless card is a Prism-II based PCMCIA card. Pretty standard fayre for wireless networking, and is supported just fine in all modern Linux distros. The only spanner in the works is that the card's used in a PLX adaptor sitting in a normal PCI slot on a desktop PC. I've had headaches getting things working in some other distros, but Knoppix worked just great - here's how:
Run wlcardconfig from a Knoppix terminal prompt. This'll guide you through entering the pertinent information - Wireless network name, channel number, encryption key, etc. Then, run netcardconfig to set up the usual stuff like IP addresses, etc. My LAN has a DHCP server, so I just hit Return once and it was all done.
*boggle* Could it really be that easy? Mostly :-)
The problem I hit was that the wireless settings weren't permanent. During a restart, the boot script which brought up the wireless interface would be unable to get a DHCP address, and it would fail. Only re-running wlcardconfig (which remembered the settings) would configure the card enough for ifup eth0 to work.
What's happening here is that wlcardconfig was saving the settings into /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts. As you can probably tell, this is part of the PCMCIA card services suite. As such, these settings would only be read and applied if the card was being used as a PCMCIA card (like on a laptop) and not in a PLX adaptor as I am. When used with the adaptor, the card acts like any normal PCI card, and so the PCMCIA card services are never used.
What I needed was to find out the proper way of associating the wireless settings with the card, and applying them when the interface was brought up with ifup eth0
I'd found that interface definitions (i.e. IP addresses, whether they use DHCP or not) were in /etc/network/interfaces A bit more poking around, specifically, in /usr/share/doc/wireless-tools/README.Debian, it seems that you can add wireless parameters to this file, and have them applied whenever the interface is brought up.
For example, my file looks something like:
iface eth0 inet dhcp
wireless_essid MyNetwork
wireless_mode Ad-Hoc
wireless_channel 5
wireless_key 1A2B3C4D5E6F7A8B9C0D1E2F
... and you're done!
(for reference, a link to the original discussion on the Knoppix.net forums is here
Notify me of follow-up comments via email.
→ 0 Comments
Posted in alucard and integra hellsing
