On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 21:59 -0500, Jim Haynes wrote: > I'm trying to help a youngster get into Linux. The system is Fedora 8 > with all the current updates, kernel is 2.6.24.3-50. The wi-fi > hardware is Netgear WPN311.
Unfortunately, model numbers use often irrelevant. Some hardware vendors even change the chipset without changing the model number. The PCI ID would be more useful. But for Atheros devices the subsystem ID may also be useful to distinguish supported and unsupported chipsets. This command should show the necessary data about Atheros devices: lspci -vn -d 168c: Google search for WPM311 suggests that it's 168c:0013, using AR5212/AR5213 chipset. > The router in his house is Belkin > something-or-other. We got it to come up under Windows 2000. I interpret is that you could make that access point appear in the list of access points in range using the same wireless card on a Windows 2000 system. I suggest you to read this document: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html > The ath5k module gets loaded and creates wlan0 . I've used > ifconfig wlan0 up > iwlist wlan0 scanning and it reports the essid of the Belkin, as > well as several others in the neighborhood That's a good sign, it shows that the card is working with the driver. > iwconfig wlan0 essid "<what the iwlist reported>" > > and then dhclient wlan0 and it seems to try but not to get a > connection. > > What should we be doing or trying? (or should we go back to madwifi?) You didn't mention any encryption. Please make sure that the AP indeed doesn't require any keys (WEP or WPA) and has no MAC filtering enabled. mac80211 based drivers may fail to associate if the ESSID is set up before the interface is brought up. Check iwconfig for the link quality. If it's zero, the card is not associated with the AP. You may need to set ESSID again. I've seen dhclient bringing the interface down momentarily and thus breaking the connection. If that happens, try setting the ESSID in another terminal while dhclient is trying to associate. Check kernel messages using the dmesg command. They may indicate some driver failures. -- Regards, Pavel Roskin _______________________________________________ ath5k-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ath5k.org/mailman/listinfo/ath5k-users
