A little help with Belkin 802.11g WNIC under Linux

ve

Hi folks got a present of one of these cards earlier today, and installed it in a spare machine at home where I'm running a Linux server (Fedora Core 2). The card doesn't come with Linux support out of the box, so I wandered around online and managed to get the thing up and running to my surprise using ndiswrapper which uses a windows driver (.inf) under Linux.

I still haven't got the NIC talking to my wi-fi router in the house, and I hope you can tell me what I'm doing wrong.

What I've done so far...(The card is: Belkin PCI 802.11g WNIC model F5D7001)
1) Found out that the supplied windows driver (.inf) will not work using ndiswrapper
2) Sourced a version that will work in the form of a download from Dell (of all places, my machine is not a dell, they just have an alternative driver). http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R81433.EXE (use bcmwl5a.inf in directory AR, they say)
3) Using "ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5a.inf" // (installs the driver and works!!)
4) Now I do a "modprobe ndiswrapper" // which loads the installed driver....works!!
5) Now when I do "iwconfig" I finally see a wlan0 entry
6) Then I did "iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed" // and that executed flawlessly
7) Then I did "iwconfig wlan0 essid [my_essid]" // and that executed flawlessly

Now here is where things started to go pear shaped. In the guide I was following (http://pcpitstop.ibforums.com/index.php?showtopic=74354&st=0&#entry769764), all they said I had to do after this was "ifup wlan0". Now when I do that I get a "/sbin/ifup: configuration for wlan0 not found." error. So off I toddled to the "/etc" dir to find that there isn't a mention of "wlan0", so this is my guess as to why "ifup" is crapping out on me. Now I can't for the life of me understand why at this stage "ifup wlan0" couldn't execute, and why there is no wlan0 file in the /etc dir. In that machine there is no other network adapter installed.

I'm feel like I'm so close. What am I doing wrong. I also downloaded the iwtools source package. I built them grand from source, but when I try to run anything "wlist wlan0 scan" for example, I just get dependency errors such as "libiw.so.27" not found. Where can I obtain those shared libraries? (and do I need them to get this card on the network?)

Any light you can shine on this would be grately appreciated. Thanks in advance and Happy Christmas

ve

OK I'm making progress, I've got the machine on the network now, but not the the way I want it. I can ping both ways, and connect to ports etc. So it's fair to say at this point I have successfully gotten this card working under Linux.

Now I'm quite new to Linux so you'll have to forgive my lack of knowledge. As I said in my last post "ifup wlan0" returned a "/sbin/ifup: configuration for wlan0 not found." error. So I found out I can use the following command "ifconfig wlan0".

So I used: "ifconfig wlan0 [static_ip_addr] netmask 255.255.255.0 up"

After I did that, I had assigned a static IP on the same subnet as my router and I could ping both ways. I was able to go to another windows box on my network, and SSH in to the Linux server with no problems. You see I have DHCP running on my wi-fi router, which assigns IPs to the other machines on my network. I want the server to automatically get an IP from this when it boots. Right now when I restart the machine I have to manually bring the card up myself. Also when the machine boots I was watching the various services get started, and I don't see anything bringing up network interfaces (wlan0, etc....only loopback).

I'm quite possitive I should be able to have the machine boot, authenticate with my router, pick up an IP from DHCP, and join the network. Is there a script I can get or write to achieve this?

Also if it's not too much trouble, I would like to enable WEP(128bit) on the network, and disable ESSID broadcasts on the wi-fi router. Can I also put key in this script so the card can transmit over the network?

Thank you very much

ve

Right I feel kinda stupid now, coz I've managed to get the whole thing working by myself. It turns out all I needed to do was edit "/etc/sysconfig/network" & create "/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0" to get everything up and running just as I wanted.

Feel free to lock this thread mods (I'm finished talking to myself )

If anyone has one of these network cards and wants to get it running under linux and can't get it working from my ramblings above, don't hesistate in giving me a shout and I'll happily walk you through it.

Happy Christmas

My Opinion

Posting in this tread so you are not alone

Dingatron

I'm finished talking to myself

Actually thanks for the post. I will be doing something simular soon, so this info will come in handy.