WiFi fails on Inspiron 8200/RH9

[max1milion]

I've been trying for several hours now to get Red Hat Linux 9 working on my friend's Dell Inspiron 8200, and for the most part it seems to be working. The only necessary things that are left to fix (i.e. not modem, TV-Out, etc.) are the integrated WiFi card and possibly APM.

So far I've managed to pretty well verify that the integrated wireless card in here is in fact the Dell TrueMobile 1150 card based on the Lucent/Agere Orinoco chipset, which should by all means work "out of the box" with RH9, and it certainly seems to at least install and configure perfectly. The problem lies in that even though the card actually sets up just fine, attempting to activate it under DHCP produces a "Determining IP information for eth1... failed." error at best. If I set the card to use a fixed IP address then it even activates correctly, but cannot ping anything other than itself and, of course, broadcast, which returns pings only from itself anyway.

The interesting part about that, however, is that when I set the card up as a normal ethernet adapter (it is, after all, essentially a mini-PCI version of my trusty Lucent/Orinoco WaveLAN PCMCIA card which worked fine when configured as an ethernet card on another RH9 laptop and actually uses the same driver) instead of a wireless adapter the card automatically assigned itself to an SSID of "default" and a channel of 6, which are both consistent with my wireless LAN even though I specified none of that information myself, which is just as it should be. Those may be defaults if no WiFi network is detected, but I don't think that is the case. However, the card still cannot use DHCP or communicate with the rest of the LAN when its IP is fixed. This is very strange, because it now seems almost as if the card detects the WiFi network itself but cannot communicate with my AP/router at the IP level for some reason.

Does anyone know what might be causing this problem, or know of anything that I might be able to try to at least figure out where the problem is?

Thanks,

- Max

[ven0m]

Have you deactivated eth0? (your ethernet nic)
ifconfig eth0 down
then try to communicate with your wireless network.

[max1milion]

Just tried... the results are the same for eth1 with eth0 up and with eth0 down: if I attempt to activate eth1 under DHCP it dies with the error "Determining IP information for eth1... failed." If I activate it with a fixed IP it comes up but can't ping anything. What else can I try to debug this?

PS -- I'm gone for tonight, so I'll work on this more tomorrow. Thanks for the help!

PPS -- I just used my PCMCIA Lucent/Orinoco WaveLAN card in this laptop and that worked fine with eth0 deactivated, so I'm quite sure that the LAN itself does work in this area. What else could cause this problem?

[ven0m]

Can you post the output for your ifconfig for eth1 and your wireless config files.

[max1milion]

Well to be honest I'm not entirely sure what my wireless config files ARE, but I found a reference to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 online and it seems to contain relevant settings for the card; in fact I have had some luck editing it. For example, when I use the RH network GUI to configure the card as wireless and use DHCP, attempting to activate the card produces the following error:

Error for wireless request "Set Encode" (8B2A) :
invalid argument "s:".

Determining IP information for eth1... failed.

and /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 looks like this:

# Please read /usr/share/doc/initscripts-*/sysconfig.txt
# for the documentation of these parameters.
USERCTL=no
PEERDNS=yes
TYPE=Wireless
DEVICE=eth1
HWADDR=00:02:2d:6d:a4:ab
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
ONBOOT=no
DHCP_HOSTNAME=
ESSID=default
CHANNEL=1
MODE=Managed
RATE=11Mb/s
IPADDR=
NETMASK=
GATEWAY=
NETWORK=10.1.10.0
BROADCAST=10.1.10.255
NAME=
DOMAIN=
KEY=s:

This is strange because for whatever reason the config file seems aware of my subnet, but not of the actual gateway or even of the network itself (which is on channel 6). It is possible that the NETWORK and BROADCAST lines contain information that is left over from an old version of that config file from when i had the card configured with a fixed IP.

Since the error complained about an invalid "s:" argument and I had no key for the network anyway, I figured I'd try and remove the "s:" from the "KEY" field and just leave that entirely blank. Sure enough, changing "KEY=s:" to "KEY=" made the system produce only the following error when trying to activate the card:

Determining IP information for eth1... failed.

Of course at that point the device failed to initialize so there is no ifconfig output for it to speak of.

Unfortunately RedHat gives you no way to use their GUI to switch an existing wireless controler from DCHP over to fixed IP so I edit the following lines in the above config file to read:

PEERDNS=no
BOOTPROTO=none
IPADDR=10.1.10.234
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
GATEWAY=10.1.10.1

Now the device activates with an ifconfig output of

eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:02:2D:6D:A4:AB
inet addr:10.1.10.234 Bcast:10.1.10.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:153 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:43772 (42.7 Kb)
Interrupt:11 Base address:0x100

but it can't ping anything but its own IP.

Even changing the channel to the one that my network is on doesn't fix the problem; the device still produces the same errors and misbehavior when I set

CHANNEL=6

in the config file.

If I configure the device from the GUI as a normal Ethernet controler, however, the config file looks like this:

# Please read /usr/share/doc/initscripts-*/sysconfig.txt
# for the documentation of these parameters.
USERCTL=no
PEERDNS=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
DEVICE=eth1
HWADDR=00:02:2d:6d:a4:ab
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
ONBOOT=yes
ESSID=default
CHANNEL=6
MODE=Managed
RATE=11Mb/s
NETWORK=10.1.10.0
BROADCAST=10.1.10.255

I don't know if the "CHANNEL=6" and "ESSID=default" and "NETWORK=10.1.10.0" and "BROADCAST=10.1.10.255" lines are just artifacts from my last config or if the WiFi is actually working "enough" to pick up on those aspects of the network on its own, but either way the error I get is still the same:

Determining IP information for eth1... failed.

And, just as before, changing to a fixed IP address (which I can now do from the GUI since RH lets you do that for ethernet (i.e. not "wireless") controllers) allows the device to activate, but not to really be on the network as it can't ping anything. Switching to a fixed IP also adds the following lines to the end of the config:

IPADDR=10.1.10.234
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
GATEWAY=10.1.10.1

and of course sets BOOTPROTO=none.

When the device is active in that configuration, the ifconfig looks much the same as it did when the device was set to use a fixed IP as a wireless controller (after all, being "wireless" or "ethernet" is really just another line in the config file and doesn't mean much else):

eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:02:2D:6D:A4:AB
inet addr:10.1.10.234 Bcast:10.1.10.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:199 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:52972 (51.7 Kb)
Interrupt:11 Base address:0x100

I don't know what the problem actually is, but the fact that the device can neither configure itself using DHCP nor ping anything on the network when configured with a fixed IP makes it seem like it can't communicate with the AP at the radio level, almost as if there were no signal. However, there definitely is a signal right here and this laptop has in fact been on this very network at this very spot before, albeit under a different OS. I do not, however suspect that the problem is just some fundamental incompatibility with Linux or something like that, both because many pages online report instant success using this WiFi card in this laptop under RedHat 9, and because just before I installed Linux, Windows XP (the former occupant of this laptop) was also refusing to recognize the network. It is possible that the problem is hardware, but I want to exhaust all possible options for attempting to fix this problem on the OS side before I blame the card itself. After all, troubleshooting is free; mini-PCI cards are far from that.

Thanks for the help!

- Max

[Icarus]

Error for wireless request "Set Encode" (8B2A) :
invalid argument "s:".

I get this when I activate the card in Auto mode, try setting it for "Managed"
Also try editing the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 file and take the s: out after KEY=

Try specifing the ESSID and if that doesn't work try Auto (Use the wireless applet to watch to see if it does connect to anything then "iwconfig" to see what it connected to) I see your ESSID is set at "default" which is a bad name if that is the name of the Access Point

Check your WAP (Access Point) settings, if it was setup not to broadcast you need to specify the ESSID, if WEP is enabled you need a key and also there are security options on the WAP to only allow certain MACs to connect...
What is the WAP anyway? I have a D-Link and I have to say it sucks big time...lots of times I can't get it to connect and others no problems but most of the time I need to try over and over at least 3 times for a connection...

[max1milion]

As I wrote in my last post, the card was in Managed mode and I tried to take the "s:" out of the "KEY" field. Doing so resolved the "s:" invalid argument error, but unfortunately did not allow the card to connect to my network.

Yes, my SSID is in fact "default", and you're quite right, it's not a very good idea to keep that name for it... I suppose I'll change it.

At the expense of security I have WEP deactivated on this network just to make setting connections up slightly less complex, so I think there should be no keys or encryption information needed to make this work. This MAC has connected before, but this laptop has been mothballed for almost three months and, upon having been reawakened, no longer connects.

Setting the device to auto mode actually produces more errors, and unfortunately the card still does not activate.

Yes, my WAP is in fact a D-Link, and though I haven't had many problems with it in the past I have heard some horror stories. So far, though, they have only involved having to manually set the SSID and Channel in order to connect. The fact that this card isn't even initializing, though, combined with the fact that the card did not connect to the network (though I didn't put any effort into making it work) under Windows just before formatting and the fact that there is another RH9 laptop a few feet away using the PCMCIA version of this WiFi card just fine on the same WAP makes me think that the problem is probably not the access point.

Any additional advice would be very much appreciated,

Thanks,

- Max