Madwifi on Fedora Core 3

[A. P. Freundorfer]

On Mon, 2005-05-30 at 20:52 -0400, Bill Johnson wrote:
> OK... I'm tearing my hair out on this one.  I recently upgraded from 
> Fedora Core 1 (actually, it was a clean install) to Fedora Core 3.  I 
> use a Netgear HA501 (80211.A) wireless card, which I had working under 
> Core 1.  It took me weeks at that time, as I recall, and was easily the 
> closest I've come to giving up on Linux.  Now, I'm in the same boat.  
> I've spent hours searching for every error message on Google, tried to 
> use the #MADWIFI irc channel (got no response), and still cannot get it 
> to work.
> 
> SO... is there anybody on this group who has this working with Fedora 
> Core 3, and would be willing to correspond with me to get it working?  
> If I plug my mepis CD in, the thing works perfectly.  But for some 
> reason, it is stumping me with FC3.
> 
> Thanks in advance for any assistance.
> 
> Bill J.
> 

I had some difficult making Madwifi on Fedora Core 3 using WPA-PSK, but I 
succeed in the end. This what I did:

Hardware: D-link wireless router DI-624 and miniPCI DWL-G650 on my notebook 
(also successful using a USB DWL-G122)

Useful web pages:
FAQ > http://www.mattfoster.clara.co.uk/madwifi-9.htm
FC3 setup > http://fedoranews.org/blog/?p=599

I got it working first with  USB DWL-G122 using ndiswrapper and 
wpa_supplicant. So I knew I was doing it right with the router and that 
wpa_supplicant was working right. I didn't like this solution because on 
needs to run a custom kernel to increase stack size to 16k. ifup/ifdown wlan0 
worked no problem and therefore neat also. 

This was not true for the Madwifi module as described at the end of 
http://fedoranews.org/blog/?p=599. After lots of searching what worked for me 
was the following script:

#!/bin/bash
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin/
#Secure:
#WPA-PSK Works!
modprobe ath_pci
ifconfig ath0 up
#iwlist ath0 scan
wpa_supplicant -Bw -iath0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -Dmadwifi
dhclient
iwconfig ath0 rate 54M
#iwconfig
#ifconfig
#NOTE: if you use ifup WPA-PSK doesn't work for this driver!
#Also you might need to unplug it to get it to load ath0 properly

I don't understand why ifup doesn't work, and therefore neat, like on the 
other wireless card but the above script works for me.

To take the wireless connection down I have the following script:
#!/bin/bash
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin
#Shutting Down:
ifdown ath0
modprobe -r ath_pci
killall -s SIGUSR1 wpa_supplicant
killall -s SIGUSR1 dhclient

Some of the code might be redundant.

regards
al