wireless ethernet problems

[Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper]

re, all.

I've got a couple of questions regarding the use of wireless cards in
the core series....  I'm currently running fc2t2, though 2 of the 3
problems I'm having occur also under core1, fc2t1, and fc2t3 as well.

1) I have a Symbol wireless card, which uses the orinoco_cs driver.  But
under every fedora release (core1, fc2t{1,2,3}), the definition for this
card is missing in /etc/pcmcia/config.  I have to hand-patch this in
every time, and it looks like this:

card "LA4111 Spectrum24 Wireless LAN PC Card"
  version "Symbol Technologies"
  bind "orinoco_cs"

As far as I can recall, this has always been included in the config file
for pcmcia in debian sid, Mandrake 9, 10, and SuSE 9.0.  Is fedora using
an out of date pcmcia package?  Or have the other distros patched this
in?  The effect of this not being in config, btw, is that the card isn't
recognized at all by pcmcia, and no drivers are loaded when the card is
inserted.  Once I add that line to config, then pcmcia dutifully loads
the orinoco_cs drivers properly.

Which leads to my second problem....

2) The GUI network configurator has never worked right for me in fedora
(again, core1, fc2t{1,2,3}) in that it doesn't seem to know how to
handle WEP enc keys properly.  If I enter "0x..." for the WEP key in the
GUI, the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/keys-eth1 file has
"KEY=s:0x...", which of course doesn't show correctly in iwconfig. 
After I manually edit the keys-eth1 file to "KEY=FFFFAA..., etc.", it
works just fine in core1, fc2t1 and fc2t2.  I also have to hand-edit the
ifcfg-eth1 script to change channel from 1 to 6 and rate to auto, rather
than 11mbps.  Here, also, the GUI doesn't allow you to make these
changes when I believe it should.

So, if I hand-edit those files and make those changes, all works
swimmingly in core1, fc2t1,2, which brings me to my third problem....

3) in core2 test3, I can't for the life of me get my wireless card to
DHCP correctly.  I've made the above-mentioned changes to the system. 
pcmcia loads the drivers correctly, iwconfig shows the correct settings
for the card, but no dhcp address is gotten.  What confuses me even more
is that it WAS working!!  I installed fc2t3 2 nights ago, and the
wireless card was working.  I believe I did a 'yum update' last night
and today, it's borken.

The only thing I see in /var/log/messages that looks semi-relevant is
this: 
May  3 07:00:46 localhost kernel: NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth1: transmit timed
out
May  3 07:00:46 localhost kernel: eth1: Tx timeout! ALLOCFID=0165,
TXCOMPLFID=0303, EVSTAT=800b

and after that, the only things I see in messages is that dhclient isn't
able to get any dhcpoffers.  Also, this happens both on the fc2t3 2.6.5
fedora-patched default kernel, as well as on a clean, vanilla 2.6.4
kernel.

So, I guess my questions are:

- are these things known issues, or should I enter bugzillas for them?

- does anyone have any idea on what's going wrong with my wireless card
(using WEP) in trying to get a dhcp address in core2 test3?  Is anyone
successfully using core2 test3 on a laptop, using WEP?

TIA!!!



-- 

,-----------------------------------------------------------------//
| Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper ::  Numbers 6:22-26 
 `
 | All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much MUCH thicker 
 | in the middle, and then thin again at the far end.  That is 
 | the theory that I have and which is mine, and what it is too.  
 ,
| bash$ :(){ :|:&};:
`----------------------//