I'm having 'issues' getting my wireless connection started. Once up and running it's fine (even surviving restarting the AP), but getting it there is unreliable.
I'm using a desktop machine with EDIMAX 7128g PCI card (rt2500 chipset) and last Friday's CVS for the rt2x00 drivers, installed using 'make install-fedora' which sets up an alias for wlan0.
The network is using WPA, so I need to use iwpriv commands to set it up. It seems the settings could be put in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0, but I can't get this to work.
What I'm doing at the moment (after some trial and error), is to have the iwpriv commands in /root/wlan and to hit the system-control-network start for the wireless connection and (after a short delay), run '. wlan' as root:
ifcfg-wlan0: # Please read /usr/share/doc/initscripts-*/sysconfig.txt # for the documentation of these parameters. IPV6INIT=no ONBOOT=no USERCTL=yes PEERDNS=yes #modified line: GATEWAY=192.168.2.1 # TYPE=Wireless DEVICE=wlan0 HWADDR=00:0e:2e:51:c5:25 BOOTPROTO=dhcp NETMASK= #modified line: DHCP_HOSTNAME=ibm21 # IPADDR= DOMAIN= ESSID=thessid CHANNEL=7 MODE=Managed IWPRIV="set EncrypType=TKIP set WPAPSK='thekey' set TxRate=0"
/root/wlan: iwconfig wlan0 mode managed iwpriv wlan0 set AuthMode=WPAPSK iwpriv wlan0 set EncrypType=TKIP iwpriv wlan0 set WPAPSK="thekey" iwpriv wlan0 set TxRate=0
Some observations: The IWPRIV line in ifcfg-wlan0 was manually added and is wrong, these commands should be seperate. However I've also tried them as seperate IWPRIV="" lines with no more success. If someone can suggest something else to do with them I'd be happy to try. There is also the question of whether or not the key should be quoted. I'm not sure I've tried all the options, but I think the card only associates with the network when the key is right so that's not too hard to spot.
The card does not always seem to be 'on' when the system starts up: #iwlist scan won't show any networks (there are several). I haven't been able to reliably start it yet (I've tried 'ifconfig wlan0 up' as some of the howtos suggest this needs to be run before the card accepts any iwpriv or iwconfig commands). lsmod always shows the rt2500 module. After sufficient tries it will seem to wake up, and iwlist scan will show the available networks.
The fact that running the wlan script concurrently with an ifup wlan0 seems to be required suggests there's something funny about the order of the commands/options in ifcfg-wlan0. I've also noticed the Tx/Rx lights come on once '. wlan' has been run. Does anyone have any suggestions about this? Does the order the options are listed even make a difference to the order they are run in? I'd like to get ifcfg-wlan0 working properly so I can set it to connect on boot but atm this isn't going to happen.
Any thoughts appreciated.
imalone
