[TriLUG] Connecting to the UNC Wireless network

Andrew Perrin clists at perrin.socsci.unc.edu
Tue Feb 10 12:52:18 EST 2004


Welcome to UNC!  You should also know of the unclug list (check out
listserv.unc.edu for more) which has recently started.

I recently got around to using my wireless on the UNC network too. I was
uanble to do it at all with iwconfig, but got it working using the AUC
utility from Cisco.  I set the essid and key as you suggested, then did
dhclient eth0 to get address information.

One simple question: have you registered your machine's MAC address for
DHCP?  If not, that would do it.

Also, try dhcping to diagnose where you are/aren't getting addresses from.

Finally: does the machine successfully attach to the network using wired
ethernet?

ap

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
clists at perrin.socsci.unc.edu * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu


On Tue, 10 Feb 2004, Dmitry Rashkeev wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I am a student at UNC-Chapel Hill, and a fairly avid linux user. At this
> point, I have an IBM R40, the standard laptop sold by the university at
> a discount to students. Needless to say, my first boot involved the
> Mandrake installation disk. The computer adjusted extremely well to the
> new OS. At this point, I dual boot between Windows and Linux, and things
> could not get any happier. The only problem I have had so far was
> getting the wireless driver to work. The card in the computer is a Cisco
> Aironet 350, with a MiniPCI interface. Needless to say, it was exotic
> enough not to be detected by Mandrake's harddrake thingy, and so I had
> to move on to the manual configuration. I installed both the Cisco
> drivers and the ario_mpi drivers that have been floating around, and
> with little luck.
>
> The UNC wireless network is encrypted with a 40-bit key, and requires a
> registered MAC address to connect. I tried both the stock Cisco drivers
> and the opensource airo_mpi, but could not get them to work. In both
> cases, the drivers loaded successfully into the kernel, and lit up my
> radio light indicator on the panel of my laptop. After that, the
> troubles began. The airo_mpi drivers loaded successfully, and I was able
> to talk to them using the iwconfig interface. I could even scan the
> ether for access points, and found quite a few of them. However, I
> simply could not get the darn thing to associate. I got it to work
> twice, both in disconnected incidents, but for my life could not figure
> out what I did. iwconfig eth1 essid "****"; iwconfig eth1 key
> ****-****-** restricted; iwconfig eth1 key on turned off my radio. I had
> to go iwconfig eth1 key [1] ****-****-** restricted; iwconfig eth1 key
> [1] on which seemed to work, and the radio was reactivated. At that
> point, the key was configured, so iwconfig eth1 ap any should have
> produced some sort of binding. It did not. My subsequent attempts have
> been basically typing iwconfig commands at random, until the card
> associated. I could find no correlation between the commands and what I
> did, and I could not go through the .bash_history since the computer
> crashed every time I got the card working (a rare thing for linux, so
> I'm thinking it's not coincidence). The second time it worked after a
> pretty much random combination (in different order) of the commands
> above. This seemed very un-linuxlike.
>
> With Cisco, the iwconfig interface did not work, so I used the ACU
> utility. Here I found a very interesting "feature," where the default
> password was set when the program was started, and said password was not
> in any documentation. After a while, I found (on the internet) that the
> password was "Cisco." After figuring that bit out, the interface
> associated without problem to the access point, but dhcp simply did not
> work. Strangely, the ifconfig and the cisco status utility both said
> that there was network traffic caused by dhclient. The only problem
> seemed to be that dhcp was for whatever reason not detecting the server.
> At this point, I could not take the pain anymore, so I stopped. Has
> anyone had any luck with this card/computer combination, or mybe even
> the good fortune of having connected to the UNC network under Linux? I
> appreciate any help I can get.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Dmitry Rashkeev
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