Wireless Networking using a Linksys WPC11

["Flood Randy Capt AFCA/TCAA" <randy.flood@scott.af.mil>]

Hi.

A Quick aside:I got my cable modem working yesterday.  The problem was that AT&T had installed a notch filter on the cable line outside my house that filtered out stuff needed for my cable modem to work.  (AT&T came out twice and never got it working.  I spent hours on the phone previously dealing with AT&T and trying to convince them that if my cable modem would not sync up, it was not because my networking settings in Windows were incorrect...)  Not to mention that month delay between my call and when they could send a technician to come to my house.  I called Charter, and 4 days later I had a self-install kit.  When that didn't work properly, I called them on Friday afternoon, and Monday morning they came out and in about 5 minutes they solved the problem.  Suffice it to say, my experiences with Charter are 100 times better than with AT&T...  

In any case, that motivated me to get my wireless network up and running.  I was planning on waiting until I had some more money and buying a new wireless NIC that was more Linux friendly.  But, the lure of using the cable modem from anywhere in the house was enough to convince me to look into this more.

There is a driver for my wirless nic at:

http://www.linux-wlan.com/linux-wlan/


I first looked at the instructions at: http://www.saragossa.net/LinuxG3/ls-wlan.shtml

I losely followed the instructions there.  They did not have an rpm for my version of the kernel.  (The first thing I did when I got my cable modem up is to make sure I had all the latest updates from Red Hat.  The driver compiles into a kernel module.  Kernel module binaries are specific to the version of the kernel that they were compiled for.  Hence, I needed to compile a new driver. 

Next, I downloaded the latest stable driver sourcecode from ftp://ftp.linux-wlan.org/pub/linux-wlan-ng/.  Actually, I think I downloaded linux-wlan-ng-0.1.12.tar.gz.  I see that I probably should have went with 0.1.13.  The "ng" bit means that this is the newer driver that supports 11 MBs. 

In any case, I gunzip'd and tar xvf'd the code.  To compile it, I needed to download the latest pcmcia-cs code.  After a quick google search, I found it at http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/pcmcia-cs/pcmcia-cs-3.1.31.tar.gz.

I had to gunzip and tar xvf that too.  I also had to ./configure it, as I recall.  You don't actually have to install a new version of this, but the Linux-wlan-ng stuff requires it to be configured for it to compile.

Then, I had to make the linux-wlan-ng stuff.  Typing "make" gave a list of options.  The "make autoconfig" didn't work for me.  I tried the iotion which said it would prompt me for answers to the questions.  I had to tell it where my pcmcia-cs code lived, as well as give it the proper location to install the modules.  (I think that Red Hat put some default extraversions flag in the kernel configuration stuff in their kernel source rpm because the directory guessed by linux-wlan-ng was almost right, but had some extra sillyness on the end of the kernel version.  After removing the extra sillyness, all was well...)  I gave it the "make install" option or somesuch and it installed everything.

The only other thing I had to do was edit the /etc/pcmcia/wlan-ng.opts file and replace "ssid=linux-wlan" with ssid="<mynetworkid>".  (The default for my access point is "lynksys", but I'm not using the default.

After a quick restart of the pcmcia stuff, my wireless network card came up, got its address via dhcp and I was on the net. 

Now, all that work was a bit annoying.  But, it was fun too, so it wasn't all bad.  Now, the average computer user would never put up with all that.  How do I know?  My wife has been complaining about Earthlink dropping our modem connections inexplicably every 5 minutes some times.  After setting up the cable modem and everything, I had a cat-5 cable ready to plug into my wife's iBook.  She protested that she would not use the cable modem.  Why?  She understood the phone line, and where it plugged into her computer. She did not want to have to switch to using a new cable that plugged into a different place.  All of my arguments of how many times faster it was, how a cat-5 cable really looked a lot like a phone cable, and how the place it plugged in to her computer was right next to the phone port, were futile.  

She has agreed to let me install a wireless nic in her iBook though.  I promised her that it would allow her to be on the Internet from anywhere in the house with no cables "magically".  But she doesn't see the need to learn a new technology when I am going to replace it soon with the wireless nic.  


Randy  


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