Airport question

[Tom Burke]

Well....

I re-installed, as a 'Desktop Machine'. On boot eth1 failed to come up. 
I had a look at the config file and it was just three lines long. This 
time I didn't try to edit it, I went straight to the System Settings -> 
Network dialog box and had a go there, where eth1 was indeed shown as 
Inactive. I clicked on Activate, was asked to save the revised 
configuration, said OK, and off it went. It produced a couple of the 
familiar error messages, then went to the 'Determining IP information 
for eth1' display, and eventually timed out with no IP information. So 
I stayed in the dialog box and set some of the obvious settings - get 
dns information from dhcp provider, and entered the WEP key in hex 
mode, prefixing it as instructed with '0x'. Then I clicked on 
'Activate' again. Again, there were a couple of the SET error messages; 
then it went to the 'Determining IP information for eth1' point; but 
after a few seconds it cleared down without further errors and 
announced that eth1 was active! After making eth0 inactive and removing 
the ethernet cable I tried a couple of pings - first in my local 
network, then out onto the internet - and all was fine. I've rebooted, 
and everything seems OK still. I'm now using Mozilla successfully.

So what did I do that was different? Two things:- a) the installation 
path I followed. My previous installations were of 'Workstation', with 
quite a bit of package selection - I added a lot of server stuff and 
removed quite a few developer selections. This time I took a basic 
Desktop installation, and the only change I made was to select Gnome 
rather than KDE. Is it possible that the different installation scripts 
are installing different versions of the configuration tool?; and b) 
this  time I relied purely on the config tool, I didn't use directly 
edit ifcfg-eth1 at all. But I'm pretty sure that the very fist time I 
tried to get airport working I used the config tool (only); it wasn't 
until I read the archives for this list that I started playing with the 
config file directly. So I'm wondering about the installation scripts.

Tom Burke



On 5 Apr 2004, at 22:18, Tom Burke wrote:

> I am (so far) unable to get my airport card (802.11b) working in my 
> 800 Mhz G3 iBook. I've been through the archives and haven't been able 
> to find a definitive answer as to how to configure it. I'm running YDL 
> 3.0.1
>
> Here's the output from running ifup-eth1:
>
> Error for wireless request "Set Mode" (8B06) :
> 	SET failed on device eth1 ; Invalid Argument
> Error for wireless request "Set Frequency" (8B04) :
> 	SET failed on device eth1 ; Operation not supported.
> Error for wireless request "Set Encode" (8B2A) :
> 	SET failed on device eth1 ; Operation not supported.
>
>
> And here's the text of ifcfg-eth1:
>
> DEVICE=eth1
> BOOTPROTO=dhcp
> ONBOOT=no
> DOMAIN=
> NETMASK=255.255.255.0
> HWADDR=[the hardware address of the AiPort card]
> TYPE=Wireless
> DHCP_HOSTNAME=
> IPADDR=
> USERCTL=
> PEERDNS=
> GATEWAY=
> ESSID=WLAN
> CHANNEL=1
> MODE=Auto
> KEY=""
> RATE=Auto
>
>
> I'd be very grateful if someone with a working airport installation in 
> an iBook could tell me how their configuration compares to mine.
>
> Tom Burke