[TriLUG] Wireless Help

[Brian McCullough]

All,

I have been re-reading the recent messages regarding 802.11 use and
have, I thought, followed everything that was relevant to my situation,
but still have some funny behaviour ( and a lack of communication! ).


I have a Netgear MR814 v2 access point, and the laptop has an SMC 2835W,
which seems to be liked by the built-in Prism 54 driver in my Debian
2.6.8 kernel.

I have found that I can configure the Netgear box by physically
connecting the laptop to one of the LAN ports, and so have changed the
IP address ( my internal LAN is 192.168.1. ) because the default
192.168.0.1 was not compatible with the environment.  So far, so good. I
then changed the ESSID, and left WEP off ( for now ).  I also changed
the default channel 11 to 9.

My reading seemed to indicate that the Netgear wanted to be the DHCP
server for anything connecting on the wireless port, so I assigned a few
addresses and enabled that.

I then went to the laptop and, following the instructions given in a
message in my archives, did the following:

ifconfig eth0 down
iwconfig eth0 essid my_essid channel 9 key off
ifconfig eth0 up

Unfortunately, when I issue "dhcpd eth0", I get "no such command".  In
network/interfaces, I have included "iface eth0 inet dhcp" ( working
from memory, so may have mis-spelled something ).

When the wired card is plugged in to the laptop and into the Netgear, an
address is assigned to eth0.

When I connect wirelessly, funny things happen.

I issue the ifconfig down command and neither ifconfig nor iwconfig show
anything for eth0.  I issue the iwconfig command and ESSID and channel
are as set.  I issue the ifconfig up command and both lights on the SMC
card flash in varying ways.  I check ifconfig and iwconfig and find that
ifconfig does not have an address and iwconfig, each time that I issue
it, reports a different frequency and no ESSID.

Where do I go from here?


Thank you,
Brian