http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/CentOS4_rt2500_Howto
IV. CONFIGURING YOUR CARD -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CentOS recognizes the wireless NIC before you have this driver in place, but it doesn't know what driver to use. It will already assign the NIC an interface name (like eth0 or eth1). In my system, this was eth1 (because eth0 was taken by an on-board 3c905 controller) so that's what I'll use for my configuration info. To determine what yours is, run lspci as root to see that the card is detected. My card is and lspci's output looks like this: 00:0e.0 Network controller: RaLink Ralink RT2500 802.11 Cardbus Reference Card (rev 01) (the rest of the output of lspci is not displayed here) Next, check the file /etc/sysconfig/hwconf for a device that looks similar to this one. The contents of this file on my system shows these lines: - class: NETWORK bus: PCI detached: 0 device: eth1 driver: unknown desc: "RaLink Ralink RT2500 802.11 Cardbus Reference Card" vendorId: 1814 deviceId: 0201 subVendorId: 1737 subDeviceId: 0032 pciType: 1 pcidom: 0 pcibus: 0 pcidev: e pcifn: 0 - Here you see the line "device: eth1" which tells me that's what I want to set my wireless device up as. I imagine you could do this differently, but this is what worked for me. So, given that the system sees the card, and thinks it's eth1, but doesn't know what device driver to use, I need to tell it which one to use. When you issue the "make install" command, a line will be added to /etc/modules.conf that reads "alias ra0 rt2500" but that is not where you want the alias line to go. For CentOS, it needs to be in the /etc/modprobe.conf file. And, it shouldn't be ra0, it should be eth1 (or whatever device you have it as on your system). To adjust this, type the following: cat >> /etc/modprobe.conf << EOF alias eth1 rt2500 EOF and then, rename or remove the /etc/modules.conf file (I renamed it). The last step to configuring your device is to create an ifcfg-eth1 file under /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts. Type the following to create this file: cat > /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 << EOF TYPE=Wireless DEVICE=eth1 HWADDR=00:00:00:00:00:00 # replace this with your MAC address BOOTPROTO=dhcp NETMASK=255.255.255.0 DHCP_HOSTNAME= IPADDR=192.168.1.123 # replace with proper IP address GATEWAY=192.168.1.1 # replace with proper gateway address DOMAIN= IPV6INIT=no ONBOOT=yes USERCTL=yes PEERDNS=yes ESSID=any # replace with proper ESS ID CHANNEL=1 # set to proper channel MODE=Managed # don't know what happens if set Adhoc RATE=54Mb/s # could choose other rates EOF -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- V. BRINGING UP YOUR WIRELESS CARD -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- After you've built the module and created the ifcfg files to match your needs, you can control the interface using standard CentOS ifup/ifdown commands. By entering the ONBOOT=yes line in the ifcfg file, you are setting your system to automatically enable this interface when it boots up. You can now type "ifup eth1" and "ifdown eth1" to start and stop the wireless interface and it will be automatically up whenever you reboot. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- VI. TROUBLESHOOTING -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I only experienced two problems in getting this up and running: 1) the initial "make" of the module failed because I hadn't created the "build" symlink. and 2) The first time I issued my "ifup eth1" command, it would not communicate with my access point. Apparently, this was because I had the "CHANNEL=1" line above and my AP was running on channel 6. When I changed that line to "CHANNEL=6" it worked just fine. If you have any other problems, you can always try Google. -- Regards, Peter Teoh
