DLink DWL-650 woes

Rick Stevens rstevens at vitalstream.com
Mon Mar 21 22:09:31 UTC 2005


steven ney wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-03-21 at 13:25 -0800, Rick Stevens wrote:
> 
>>steven ney wrote:
>>
>>>Thanks for the advice!!!
>>>I'm a tad embarrassed to say, but I don't seem to have iwconfig (nor
>>>ifconfig) on my system. I have the GUI versions (system-config-networks)
>>>but not the command line programmes
>>
>>Please bottom post in the future.
>>
>>Anyway, iwconfig and ifconfig are available to the root user only.  You
>>have to be root to play with them.
>>
>>Log in as root (or use sudo or su) and run "iwconfig -a".  See if the
>>card is listed.  If it is, post the information shown and I'll help you
>>walk through it.  If you'd rather take this off-list (to keep passwords,
>>ESSIDs and such a bit more private), feel free to email me directly:
>>
>>	rstevens at vitalstream.com
>>
>>
>>>Thanks again
>>
>>No problem.
>>
>>
>>>On Mon, 2005-03-21 at 11:13 -0800, Rick Stevens wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>steven ney wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>Hello Everyone,
>>>>>
>>>>>I am trying to get a PCI/PCMCIA D-Link DWL 650 (rev J3) card to work on
>>>>>both my Fedora C3 desktop (PIII, 700MHz, 512M) and my Thinkpad X20. Both
>>>>>machines recognise the card/ chipset (Intersil Prism II) but after
>>>>>configuring the wlan connection (as an adhoc network), I can't activate
>>>>>the wlan network on the desktop. What is more, the error message flashes
>>>>>past so quickly that I can only make out it is allegedly not getting the
>>>>>MAC number its expecting. (As you probably can tell, I'm a noob) 
>>>>>
>>>>>I have looked through the fora and have not found anything on this card
>>>>>and I would greatly appreciate any advice. 
>>>>
>>>>I used to have one of those.  Does iwconfig show the card?  If so,
>>>>then the problem has to do with the /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts file.
>>>>There's no entry that matches the D-Link's MAC address.
>>>>
>>>>You can bypass that by using the iwconfig commands directly or by
>>>>using system-config-network to set them up.
> 
> Thanks for getting back to me so promptly!

We try, we try.  Don't get too used to it.  It's sort of a slow day
here today.

> This is very odd. I tried (as root) iwconfig -a but all I get is an
> error message telling me that Bash can't find the command. I double
> checked yum and rpm to see if I have the packages installed (net-
> tools.i386, wireless-tools.i386 and NetworkManager.i386) and I seem to
> have everything....
> 
> I suspect I am missing something very basic and obvious here.

iwconfig should be in /sbin and is part of wireless-tools.

When you did it as root, did you log in as root or do an "sudo" or "su"?
If you did an "su", you have to do "su -", as /sbin is only in root's
path after a login (or a simulated login as "su -" does).  Check the
path as root ("echo $PATH") and verify that /sbin is in it.  Or, you can
fake it via:

	/sbin/iwconfig -a

----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-           Vegetarian:  Old Indian word for "lousy hunter"          -
----------------------------------------------------------------------




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