Wireless LAN question

[Michael Baer]

>>>>> "Francis" == Francis X Maier <franx@qwest.net> writes:

    Francis> I'm running a D-Link wireless DWL-122 USB card on my
    Francis> YDL 3.0 iMac.  Per installation instructions, I
    Francis> compiled a new kernel, then installed the linux-wlan-ng
    Francis> driver.  It works great; in fact, it works much better
    Francis> than the card's commercially provided OSX driver.

    Francis> One hitch though: every time I reboot, I have to
    Francis> reenter the IP configuration again:

    Francis> ifconfig wlan0 65.101.242.XX netmask 255.255.255.248
    Francis> route add -net default gw 65.101.242.XX

    Francis> I've been told I can edit the network configuration so
    Francis> that the card comes on automatically when I reboot.

    Francis> That means I need to edit one of the files in

    Francis> /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts

    Francis> But which of the files do I edit, and what exactly do I
    Francis> do??

I believe you can also use redhat-config-network to set this up.
This will open a GUI that can guide you (I haven't really used it
though, but it should work).  You probably need to have the card
inserted for redhat-config-network to realize it's there.

On my system, the wireless comes up as eth1 and the file to
configure is /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1.  It looks
like the file you would configure is ifcfg-wlan0 (you may need to
create it, just copy the ifcfg-eth0 file and change the variables).
I couldn't find a local man page describing the format, but
basically it's just a text file with a bunch of lines, each line
declaring a variable=value.  I believe the following variables are
available:

DEVICE=wlan0 
ONBOOT=yes | no 
BOOTPROTO=static | dhcp | bootp?
IPADDR=65.101.242.XX
NETMASK=255.255.255.248
GATEWAY=65.101.242.XX
NETWORK=
BROADCAST=

You probably don't need to have NETWORK or BROADCAST values (or even
the lines at all in the file), but I'm not sure how smart the parser
is.  If you use dhcp on your network, you could also forgo the
static setup and have something like:

DEVICE=wlan0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
ONBOOT=yes


Mike

-- 
ydl@mikesoffice.com