bcmwl5a wireless g almost working

yowwww · 2005-08-02 17:44:13

I have read through all the threads here that I can find on getting this to work and I am really close, but it's not quite there so I am posting my info here in hopes that it is something simple and someone has the answer.

Details:

Ibm thinkpad
Motorola wn825g wireless card
Using ndiswrapper with bcmwl5a.inf
Custom 2.6.7 kernel
Using ndiswrapper version 1 (had tried a newer version prior)
ifconfig shows wlan0 with an assigned IP
ndiswrapper -l shows the driver is loaded and the hardware is present
lspci shows Broadcom Corporation: Unknown Device 4320 (rev 03)

iwconfig shows the following:

wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:off/any
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
Bit Rate:54 Mb/s Tx-Power:25 dBm
RTS thr:2347 B Fragment thr:2346 B
Encryption key:xxx-xxx-xx Security mode:restricted
Power Management:off
Link Quality:100/100 Signal level:-10 dBm Noise level:-256 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

so, as others have seen as well - it doesn't find the access point. I tried scanning for it, but it doesn't find it.

It can't ping anything except its own IP. The link light on the card lights up very bright and the power light is on but isnt as bright (might be normal?).

I'm using a wireless router with routing and dns disabled as an access point. It worked fine before on my previous wireless b card and there is another laptop here that I just set up for someone else and it works fine using totally different hardware and software.

Any help would be appreciated. It seems very close, but I feel like i've tried just about everything.

phrakture · 2005-08-02 18:10:21

these people seem to be having the same problem...

for the record, what commands are you using to connect to the AP?

PS Try getting the drivers directly from motorola

yowwww · 2005-08-03 01:48:35

I did try getting the drivers directly from Motorola, sorry I forgot to mention that. I tried both bcmwl5.inf and bcmwl5a.inf from both the cd that came with it and also from the motorola download and ndiswrapper returned a 'invalid driver' message when I did ndiswrapper -l. Last night I tried using the one from the pkgbuild you made for it and it worked - said it installed successfully. This has led me closer to getting it working but now im kinda stuck.

I tried using these commands recently (but had tried others in the past):

iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed
iwconfig wlan0 key restricted <mykey>
iwconfig wlan0 essid ~#~
iwconfig wlan0 channel ~#~
ifconfig wlan0 up
ifconfig wlan0 IP Address
(gateway is already in rc.conf)

i get unknown host when i ping a website name. The only thing it can ping successfully is itself. It cant ping the router either.

phrakture · 2005-08-03 15:58:21

ummm well, if you're using a static IP, are you setting it up all correctly?
add your nameservers to /etc/resolv.conf

# /etc/resolv.conf
nameserver 192.168.1.1

ifconfig wlan0 192.168.1.20 netmask 192.168.1.255 broadcast 255.255.255.0
route add gw default 192.168.1.1

Ideally, you can just add the proper info in /etc/rc.conf and start the network daemon

yowwww · 2005-08-03 17:47:29

yes, that is being set up correctly. My previous card worked fine. Here are my lines in /etc/rc.conf:

I think you have your broadcast and netmask backwards though.

I have ndiswrapper in my modules section.
My network section contains:
lo="lo 127.0.0.1"
wlan0="wlan0 192.168.1.XXX netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.1.255"
INTERFACES=(lo !eth0 !eth1 wlan0)

gateway="default gw 192.168.1.1"
ROUTES=(gateway)

and my daemons that are relevant to this:

(pcmcia wep network netfs) - in that order

and my nameserver is set fine in resolv.conf. Keep in mind these same settings (except for substituting wlan0 for eth1) work fine on my other wireless pcmcia b card. There is another laptop in the same living space that connects fine as well.

One thing I do notice is that iwconfig won't let me change the essid no matter what I do. I viewed the same setting on my roommates winfroze xp box and that setting is grayed out. I am using a d-link router as a switch with encryption enabled but I haven't had any trouble getting anything else wireless to work.

I tried playing around with iwlist as well and tried the scanning feature which showed what appears to be my other wireless card (not currently inserted) and named it wlan0 which is typically incorrect because it has always used eth1. It lists the proper essid and channel and shows a different HW address than when I do ifconfig - that shows wlan0 with a different HW address, presumably the wireless g card that is inserted. I am curious as to why the scanning is showing the previous b card still when it is no longer inserted. I looked for config files for wireless but didnt see anything I could edit manually. I will keep looking though.

If I left anything out let me know. Thanks for your input on this.

phrakture · 2005-08-03 18:03:19

yowwww wrote:

I think you have your broadcast and netmask backwards though.

Heh, yeah - I guess I do 8)

try skipping a large chunk of that iwconfig...

iwconfig wlan0 essid BUNKESSID
iwconfig wlan0 key restricted 0123456789
ifconfig wlan0 up
ifconfig wlan0 <blah>

also... the ESSID is case sensitive... at least with mine it is... so "MyEssid" is different from "myEssid"

yowwww · 2005-08-03 18:50:33

yeah, I made sure it was case sensitive. Check out my last post again - I added some things to it at the same time you responded I think.

I did some other things including iwlist scanning and such and figured out some more info. I got all my hardware addresses for the router, b and c cards. I re-ran my network with the b card inserted just so I could get more info:

iwconfig

eth0 no wireless extensions.

lo no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:off/any
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
Bit Rate:54 Mb/s Tx-Power:25 dBm
RTS thr:2347 B Fragment thr:2346 B
Power Management:off
Link Quality:100/100 Signal level:-10 dBm Noise level:-256 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:994 Missed beacon:0

eth1 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"default" Nickname:"Prism I"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:0D:XX:XX:XX:XX
Bit Rate:2 Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm Sensitivity:1/3
Retry min limit:8 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=92/92 Signal level=5/153 Noise level=116/153
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:153 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

notice the G card has no connection to the access point at all.

and here is my ifconfig:

ifconfig

eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:30:XX:XX:XX:XX
inet addr:192.168.1.108 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:3 Base address:0x100

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:201 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:201 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:12112 (11.8 Kb) TX bytes:12112 (11.8 Kb)

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0C:XX:XX:XX:XX
inet addr:192.168.1.108 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Memory:20400000-20401fff

So this tells me a few things:

1 - my b card (00:30) can find my access point (00:0D) and has an essid set as default which is correct

2 - my access point shows when I scan for it with iwlist

3 - my g card (wlan0 aka 00:0C) cant get its essid set and cant find the access point.

There is one other possibility that could be affecting this. I may have mapped the b card mac address when I configured the router before disabling routing. This may be preventing this other card from working or causing a conflict. I could try resetting the router and doing it over again although it would be a bit of a pain.

Let me know if any of this info points to something i'm missing, thanks.

phrakture · 2005-08-03 19:05:33

Hmmm how very curious...

yowwww wrote:

There is one other possibility that could be affecting this. I may have mapped the b card mac address when I configured the router before disabling routing. This may be preventing this other card from working or causing a conflict. I could try resetting the router and doing it over again although it would be a bit of a pain

Well... I guess you could use the b card and add in the MAC for the g card...
it's worth a shot, but I think iwlist should at least display an AP even if the connection is disabled for that MAC - but I'm not sure... I'd say try it out before we go any farther...

edit: another idea - can the G card see *any* APs? This might be hard to test, but in my apartment I can scan and get anywhere from 5-10 (un encrypted and open, heh) access points.

yowwww · 2005-08-03 19:20:19

no, the G doesnt seem to pick up any aps. I will try resetting the router and see what happens. Im going out for a bit so I will post back after i've tried resetting it. Hopefully that works!

phrakture · 2005-08-03 19:42:56

yowwww wrote:

no, the G doesnt seem to pick up any aps. I will try resetting the router and see what happens. Im going out for a bit so I will post back after i've tried resetting it. Hopefully that works!

Hmmm if it can't see any of them at all, that's a whole different issue....
have you tried with both bcmwl5.inf and bcmwl5a.inf?

yowwww · 2005-08-03 21:15:05

well, it could be, but here is what makes me think it could be the router:

the scan does pick up the information on the b card even when the b card is not inserted which means it is getting it from somewhere and the only place I can think of would be from the router. The G card drivers seem to be loaded fine and without any errors. In a previous post I stated that I tried several other inf files but the one from your pkg build was the only one that seemed to work and didnt give me an invalid driver message. I'm going to reset the router and take that b card out of the config if it is there and i won't bother with mapping any cards, I will just use wep and see if that works.

EDIT: OK, I reset the router and it didnt do a damn thing. It still shows the b card config when I scan with iwlist for some reason, ah well.

I am going to retry all of the drivers I have and post the results from ndiswrapper -l:

cd drivers
bcmwl5: invalid driver
bcmwl5a: invalid driver

motorola website drivers
bcmwl5: invalid driver
bcmwl5a: invalid driver

pkgbuild drivers
bcmwl5: invalid driver
bcmwl5a: invalid driver

geez, now its listing all of them as invalid! the saga continues.

EDIT - It seems the module isnt loading properly into the kernel now. Im going backwards now. I'll post back later.

yowwww · 2005-08-05 06:51:58

OK, I got the driver to load again. For some weird reason it wouldnt load from where I copied the file from the src directory within the pkgbuild but it works fine if I point to that directory when I load it.

Now, back to the same problem.

When I do a iwlist scanning, it shows my b card as usual which is not inserted, but I also get this message:

"Warning: Driver for device wlan0 recommended version 18 of Wireless Extension, but has been compiled with version 16, therefore some driver features may not be available."

and that's where I'm at now.

Arch Linux

#1 2005-08-02 17:44:13

bcmwl5a wireless g almost working

#2 2005-08-02 18:10:21

Re: bcmwl5a wireless g almost working

#3 2005-08-03 01:48:35

Re: bcmwl5a wireless g almost working

#4 2005-08-03 15:58:21

Re: bcmwl5a wireless g almost working

#5 2005-08-03 17:47:29

Re: bcmwl5a wireless g almost working

#6 2005-08-03 18:03:19

Re: bcmwl5a wireless g almost working

#7 2005-08-03 18:50:33

Re: bcmwl5a wireless g almost working

#8 2005-08-03 19:05:33

Re: bcmwl5a wireless g almost working

#9 2005-08-03 19:20:19

Re: bcmwl5a wireless g almost working

#10 2005-08-03 19:42:56

Re: bcmwl5a wireless g almost working

#11 2005-08-03 21:15:05

Re: bcmwl5a wireless g almost working

#12 2005-08-05 06:51:58

Re: bcmwl5a wireless g almost working

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