Problems with ralink (rt73) wireless USB connection

[Kevin J. Cummings]

Colin Paul Adams wrote:
> I've freshly installed Fedora 9 on the (32-bit) machine, and I
> discover that rt73usb-firmware is already installed.
> 
> So I went into system-network-config and tried adding the wireless
> configuration. It seems straight-forward, but when I try to activate
> the connection (I had to deselect the NetworkManager checkbox to try
> this - what is Network Manager?) it fails to find IP information.

NetworkManager is a wireless networking manager.  It assumes that you 
might be using your computer in more than 1 location, which implies that 
you might routinely connect to more than 1 wireless network, therefore 
it tries to "manage" which wireless network you might connect to at any 
given time.

If you only intend to use your computer with a single wireless access 
point, you might want to consider using the network service instead. 
But, be warned, while network *can* connect to properly configured 
wireless connections, it was designed to manage primarily wired network 
connections.

I use network on my desktop/server, and I use NetworkManager on my 
laptop (where I now rarely use the ethernet cable) so when I travel, it 
makes connection to *other* wireless networks a little bit easier.

When I first got my laptop, it came with FC6 already installed on it. 
The first thing (OK, one of the first things) I did was try and use 
system-config-network to connect to my wireless connection in the house.
Due to probably a number of different things (my playing with 
configuration files, ipw3945 drivers, wpa-supplicant, and possibly even 
a tug of war between network and NetworkManager) my wireless experience 
under FC6 was less than useful.  Only after 6 months of software 
upgrades was I able to start to get reasonable connection rates on the 
wireless.  However, all of that changed on F9 when I upgraded.  My 
iwl3945 configuration works very well with NetworkManager (and network 
disabled).  Its still not perfect, but its *much* better than it used to be.

> I checked the SSID and WEP key information (and I have other laptops -
> a MacBook Air and a Sony Windows XP machine) working on the router.
> 
> How do I go about diagnosing the problem?

Look at your log files.  NetworkManager logs to /var/log/messages for 
me.  There are also interesting messages about your hardware's drivers 
when your system boots as well.  the output from "lsusb" can help others 
help you as well.

If your problem is that you've configured everything right, and its just 
the access point negotiation that fails, the logs from your router might 
contain useful information as well.

> Thanks for all help.

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at rcn.com
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)