Hi,
Thanks in advance. It seems like I'm writing too many messages here.
I apologize. I hope someone can help. I'm in a world of pain
struggling with this wireless lan start-up problem.
The basic problem (and I'm guessing at this a bit) is that if the
wireless NIC doesn't find the router at boot time, for whatever reason
- the router's turned off - power is low - whatever - then the
start-up scripts don't seem to configure anything with regard to
networking at boot time. ndiswrapper is in memory but there is nothing
reported by a route command, sshd hasn't started, nor samba or nfsd.
The machine is effectively cut off from the outside world and nothing
will fix it until someone with root password comes along and
repeatedly does /etc/init.d/net.wlan0 start over and over until the
network is found. Then that person has to also start samba, nfs, ssh,
etc.
A user without root access cannot make this work and never will.
What do I do?
First off I'd like to get some verification that my assessment of this
problem is indeed true. Maybe I've misconfigured something in the
installation over the weekend.
If this is the problem with the scripts then I'd like to figure out
how to make it work so that the network is modprobed, all the routes
are in place, wlan0 has the address it's supposed to have (I don't use
dhcp) and everything is ready for when the machine finally does find
the router. This is the way it worked under FC2 and it needs to
continue to work in some manner pretty close to this and most
especially one that doesn't require root access after a reboot.
Here's the state of things when the machine hasn't found the network
at boot time:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ~ $ ping netgear
connect: Network is unreachable
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ~ $
and
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ~ # route
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
loopback localhost 255.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 lo
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ~ #
Under FC2 wlan0 was set up even if the network wasn't found
immediately and everything worked when it did.
Here's what happens when I start it by hand:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ~ # /etc/init.d/net.wlan0 start
* Caching service dependencies ...
[ ok ] * Starting wlan0
* Configuring wireless network for wlan0
* Failed to configure wireless for wlan0
[ !! [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~ # /etc/init.d/net.wlan0 start
* Starting wlan0
* Configuring wireless network for wlan0
* Failed to configure wireless for wlan0
[ !! [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~ # /etc/init.d/net.wlan0 start
* Starting wlan0
* Configuring wireless network for wlan0
* wlan0 connected to "REMOVED0 at REMOVED
* in managed mode (WEP enabled - restricted)
* Bringing up wlan0
* 192.168.10.55
[ ok ] * Adding routes
* default gw 192.168.10.3 ...
[ ok [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~ #
At this point the network is running but I still don't have the
services I need. Now I have to start sshd, smb, etc. all by hand.
Can this not be improved and work better?
My skill set is novice. I don't know what to do. One thought (not a
good one) is to put something in a cron script to check if the network
and everything else is up but I know nothing about doing that and I
think it doesn't solve the problem for the community at large,
assuming there is one.
Please let me know what other info you need.
Thanks in advance,
Mark
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