Click to See Complete Forum and Search --> : Configuring a wlan connection


mjlively
06-11-2003, 07:04 PM
I am attempting to install a PCMCIA wireless lan adapter on my laptop. I am running Redhat 8.0 with a 2.4.18-14 kernel. My PCMCIA card is a NETGEAR MA401.

To install the card I downloaded and installed the wlan package for redhat. This all went smoothly and when I plug in my card it makes the right beeps. When I execute the ifconfig command it even shows a new wlan0 interface. However the information I have in my /etc/pcmcia/network.opts file is not being loaded properly.

To be honest I am not familiar with the format of the network.opts file ir reakky even it's function and I had no example file to start out with. What I have so far was basically pieced together from the PCMCIA-HOWTO. The contents of the file are:

case "$ADDRESS" in
*,*,*,*)
#PCMCIA card
IF_PORT=""
BOOTP="n"
DHCP="n"
IPADDR="216.17.153.4"
NETMASK="255.255.255.240
GATEWAY="216.17.153.1"
DNS_1="216.17.130.1"
DNS_2="216.17.130.4"
;;
esac


since the wlan0 device wasn't automatically getting this information I went ahead and manually configured it using:

ifconfig wlan0 inet 216.17.153.4
ifconfig wlan0 inet netmask 255.255.255.240
route add default gw 216.17.153.1


The downside to all of this is that as of now I have enter those three lines everytime I start the system. I also am of the suspicion that this isn't the right way to go about this.

Any help would be appreciated