FC2 Ethernet and Wireless settings

[Peter Smith]

Scot L. Harris wrote:

>On Tue, 2004-08-10 at 03:23, Peter Smith wrote:
>  
>
>>Hello List,
>>    
>>
>>I am confused.  My questions:
>>1.  Is it possible to set up the Xircom card, with work IP numbers as 
>>"eth0" and with home IPs as "eth1", and the wireless card as "eth2" , 
>>and not have to reconfigure everything every time I change location?
>>2.  What is the correct way to set up the wireless card - should it be 
>>possible with the GUI screens, should I use terminal commands, or should 
>>I just edit the appropriate configuration files directly? (If so, which?)
>>3.  Should I identify the gateway using the GUI screen or the"route" 
>>command.  They seem to have different effects.
>>    
>>
>
>Sounds like you have the same or similar laptop that I do.  I have the
>Dell Latitude CPx.  Use the Xircom PCMCIA and a D-Link DWL-G650 wireless
>card.  The DWL-G650 also uses the prism54 driver.  In my case I use DHCP
>at work when using the Xircom card and DHCP at home when using the
>wireless card.
>  
>
Yes, I have a Latitude CPx J650.

>Not sure if this is part of the problem or not, but for all of your
>PCMCIA cards make sure you uncheck the box that says activate at boot in
>the network configuration window.  This is a known problem (which I
>doubt will ever be fixed.)
>  
>
Thanks, this fixed question 4, which I didn't ask yet.  The boot 
sequence tries to initialise eth0 before the pcmcia system, and so gets 
a bit upset.

>On my system the wireless card works and is loaded as eth0 the same as
>the xircom card.  I have said it before the way wireless cards are
>handled under linux (I think this applies to all distributions not just
>Fedora) is fairly poor.  You can get it to work but it is not really
>pretty.
>
>In my case, like yours, I can not really select the prism54 driver nor
>is the card listed correctly under the network configuration tool.  I
>believe it shows as a 3com.  What is really funny is that the same
>configuration is used whether I have the xircom card or the D-Link card
>inserted.  Like you I kind of expected to have two configurations that
>would be setup with the proper one selected based on the card inserted. 
>
>Best suggestion for your setup is to use DHCP.  Most likely the AP you
>have will supply DHCP not only for your wireless card but for your
>xircom card as well.  At work they probably have DHCP but may not.  In
>that case you will need to hard code the IP address, subnet, and gateway
>info, as well as the DNS information.
>  
>
I need to use a fixed IP at work, for various reasons.  I will try DHCP 
at home, though.

>I have not spent anytime on it but I believe there is a thread or two in
>the news group about using profiles which may resolve this for you.  But
>if you can use DHCP I have found that to be painless moving from work to
>home and back.
>
>And don't forget to disable activation at boot time for your PCMCIA
>cards.  They will magically start anyway when the PCMCIA services
>start.  include ("rant_number_1_here.php");
>
>
>  
>
I have it working, except that sometimes I can't see past the gateway.  
I haven't seen any consistent explanation for that yet - poke around a 
bit and it comes good with identical settings AFAIKS.

I would like to see Kevin's scripts too.  Is there anything on ifconfig, 
iwconfig and route for beginners?  Google helped me get this far, but I 
don't really know what I am doing :-).

Thanks a lot,
Peter