Hi all. I can't seem to get my SMC2624W wifi card working on my C860 under r121. pccardctl recognizes it (exactly as the topic description), but the light just comes on (no blinking) & I get neither eth0 nor wlan0.


Output of dmesg doesn't have much either


Is all I get.

I have assumed that mine is a hardware problem, but mine does not work either. It is intermittently recognized correctly or as a memory device.

What happens if you insert into kernel the required modules manually ?
I've no idea though what the modules should be for your card, but if it's prism/orinoco based you could try with the hostap stuff.

Good suggestion. I loaded both hostap & hostap_cs & now we're getting somewhere. I now have both a wifi0 & wlan0 interface & the light on the card is flashing. kewl.

But I can't seem to activate it after that. I installed wifi-radar & changed the conf file to point use wlan0 instead of eth0, but it still won't associate. Then I noticed that I can't get eth0 back up for my nic card until I reboot. mmmmm

Have you tried the scripts on the pdaXrom website?

You may need to do a ifconfig wlan0 up before issuing any iwconfig commands.

Here's a copy of the script I've been tweaking to get this working (rename net.txt to net). It works for my lan card (eth0), but I can't seem to get the wifi working yet. For one thing, the hostap modules aren't re-loaded on reboot, but even after I load them again manually, it still doesn't want to come up.

Pull the card and reinsert....

Let me know if that works...

Late

Ok, here's what I did.

reboot without any card in slot
insert wifi card - light on steady, no wlan0/wifi0
pccardctl eject
modprobe hostap_cs
insert card - light blinks, wifi0/wlan0 now present
tried my script, all seems to come up, but fails to try to associate
pccardctl eject
inserted ethernet card, no eth0, have to reboot to get that back

??

I managed to figure that I had to add both pcnet_cs & hostap_cs to /etc/modules to have them load automatically on bootup. Now my script will actually connect if I have the symlink /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/net.eth0 -> /etc/rc.d/init.d/net with my ethernet card plugged in. kewl

Anyway, back to wlan0. What series of commands do I have to enter to have wlan0 associate with the first AP it finds using dhcp?


doesn't do it. What am I missing. And what's the proper command to associate with a specific AP using a WEP key? WPA?

thks

do this....

ifconfig interface down
iwconfig interface essid name enc encryptkey power on
ifconfig interface up
dhcpcd interface


Late

There's an open AP I'm testing on now, but this doesn't seem to work with it. Then again, all I know is the essid. Should I have to specify the channel? The first three commands work (without errors, anyway) but it just hangs on the fourth (the light remains at a steady blink, if that means anything).

I've heard a lot of mention of wpa-supplicant. I see that's it's in the base image. Would that be better to try?

I'll try your suggestion when I get home on my own router & report back. thks

If it hangs on the last... command dhcpcd... the ap you are trying to connect to in most cases doesnt have a running DHCP Server...

Late

PS. And do worry about the channel.

Now this is getting frustrating. I get home after making NO further changes, and now no matter what I do I can't get the wlan0 interface to come back up at all. And the light on the card just stays on steady. I've tried ejecting & reinserting it, even a reboot doesn't help. And the modules are still loaded.

I wish I had an extra WiFi CF to loan ya.

Thanks for the thought anyway , Antikx . If I'm still hacking at this by then next ZUM meeting, I'll try your card, if that's ok. The we'll see if it's a card issue (see below).


I've been leaving my Z charging with the ethernet card plugged in overnight & when I pack it up to head to work I the morning, I swap the ethernet card for my wireless just out of force of habit before putting in it's pouch (& because I don't like leaving the connector bare) & wouldn't you know, the light starts flashing, indicating that it was loaded properly (i.e. wlan0 available). So I tried a quick test, but it still didn't connect. I tried to eject & insert the card & it wasn't recognized again (light stayed on, no wlan0). So as much as I wanted to, I of course had to get to work

So now I'm trying it here at work again & it's bringing up wlan0 again. kewl. I try the exact commands as InSearchOf suggested earlier (except that it's not an encrypted AP)


Still doesn't work. But shouldn't the light on the card go steady after the 'ifconfig wlan0 up', if it at least associating properly? It doesn't do that, just keeps on slowly blinking. Doesn't that indicate that the card isn't really doing anything?

I'm starting to think that maybe it's the hostap drivers itself that is flaky, especially given the intermittancy of the card loading properly. Can anyone deny or confirm this?

I still haven't found a solution for this. If any of the devs could please let me know the state of the drivers, maybe that would give me a better idea as to where I should be concetrating my efforts. Otherwise, it'll be back to beta2 for me ;(

Well after some more tests & hacking I still haven't managed to get my card to work. So I'm back on beta2 (the last one that worked well for the C7x0 models IMHO). Too bad pdaXii13 doesn't support anything 'smaller' than the C1000

I anxiously await the upcoming new 2.6 kernel release & will try again. thanks