Linux PCMCIA Card Services

I'm having great difficulty getting this combination working correctly on my Debian potato laptop.

I am currently running the 2.2.19-pre16 kernel compiled with wireless support, but no drivers.

I have built pcmcia-cs-3.1.24, and the wvlan_cs driver loads successfully and binds to an ethernet interface when the card is inserted:

Mar 1 16:33:48 stinky kernel: wvlan_cs: WaveLAN/IEEE PCMCIA driver v1.0.6
Mar 1 16:33:48 stinky kernel: wvlan_cs: (c) Andreas Neuhaus <andy@fasta.fh-dortmund.de>
Mar 1 16:33:48 stinky kernel: wvlan_cs: index 0x01: Vcc 5.0, irq 3, io 0x0100-0x013f
Mar 1 16:33:48 stinky kernel: wvlan_cs: Registered netdevice eth0
Mar 1 16:33:48 stinky kernel: wvlan_cs: MAC address on eth0 is 00 02 2d 02 9d 6f

After a while there is a low beep, and the lights on the wavelan blink together every few seconds or so. I then set the encryption key with the wireless tools (version 21pre5):

iwconfig eth0 enc s:3a380

at which point the power light (nearest the middle of the card) comes on full.

With the RG-1000 plugged into the hub, together with the router to the net I then configure the interface and add a default route:

ifconfig eth0 62.49.224.50 netmask 255.255.255.248
route add default gw 62.49.224.49

(These settings work with a normal ethernet link)

At this stage the power light on the card is lit, and everything looks good. However, I cannot ping
the gateway box (the router, 62.49.224.49).

When ping is running, the xmit light on the wavelan card blinks, and the rcv light on the RG-1000 blinks simultaneously. However, I don't see any traffic reported on iwconfig eth0 -- not even any invalid packets -- and ping reports 100% packet loss. Likewise, I can not ping anything else beyond my router.

I have tried various encryption settings, but have had no more luck. My current thinking is that since the base station has an ID sticker "23a380" that I should use this as the network ID, and "s:3a380" as the encryption key -- the behaviour of the power light seems to corroborate this.

Does anyone have a recipe, from what to download, what to build and exactly what config commands to type that I can use?

The RG-1000 is straight out of the box; does this matter? Unfortunately I don not have access to a Windows machine to check that it works correctly.

What debugging information would help to diagnose this problem?

Thanks for any help you can offer; this is frustrating...

Robin Stephenson

robin (at) aglet.net

On my web page about the Wavelan IEEE driver (see the Wireless Howto), I point to the Java configurator and the page of people that describe this kind of setup. I guess checking the config of the RG might be a good thing...

Jean

Thanks for the pointer -- unfortunately I'm having difficulty locating the link you refer to. Please could you post the URL here?

Thanks!

I have the exact same problem.

Here is my setup, and I have debugged with the wavelan
ppl on phone support.

2.2.18pre22, wvlan_cs loads fine, and I get a strong
signal (so I know the essid and enc are correct).

I have the rg1000 setup as a transparent bridge.
I have verified this with the windows tool that ships
with the rg1000.

When a win2k client gets a DHCP address from
my linux box I can see itt in /var/log/messages

When I pump -i wvlan0 on my linux laptop the
rg1000 doesn't seem to even pass the packet
to the linux-server which is handing out DHCP addresses.

I have also tried giving my laptop one of my static IP's
from my ISP..but then I can't ping the gateway.

Any ideas...as I really have having a win2k machine working
and me not be able to get my very reliable Linux machine
to work.

Thanks so much for any advances.

Jean if you reference the howto please provide me
a URL as I have read the howto.

I can provide any further info that is relevant.

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/#howto

One other relevant note is that this laptop works
with the same exact card when I am at work.
but...with different essid, and enc values. Again
thanks for any clues you might be able to throw
my way.
Shane

Cheers...

Actually I've already read the HOWTO -- the Java configurator is the thing I'm having difficulty locating.

http://edge.mcs.drexel.edu/GICL/people/sevy/airport/

I downloaded this Java app from http://edge.mcs.drexel.edu/GICL/people/sevy/airport/index.html
(and the JDK...), and now I have some more information. The "Discover Devices" button detects the following information (no wireless card inserted, so this is just SNMP over normal Ethernet):

Reply received:
Device address: 153.69.254.254
Device MAC: 00601d204d43
Device name: ORiNOCO RG-1000 23a380
Device type: RG-1000 V3.65 SN-00UT31241543 V
Device uptime (days:hrs:mins): 0:00:19

This is an NCR netblock, nothing to do with me. In any case, I then punch that into the "Device address" box, "public" into the community name box, and hit "retrieve settings". After a longish wait, nothing happens:

Retrieving settings from base station 153.69.254.254/153.69.254.254......
Error retrieving settings: timed out waiting for response.


I get the same results for both the "normal" app and the 128-bit app (my card is 128-bit).

Any more ideas from anyone..?

This URL has some more info regarding these cards -- notably it seems that the RG-1000 contains a silver card (40 bit crypto), and I have a gold card for my laptop (128 bit crypto). Could this mismathc be causing any problems?

http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/00/09/18/2345218.shtml

An answer to this question would make y life easier I think -- what is the default IP address and SNMP community name for the RG-1000?

To configure the gateway on Linux you need to do the following (I'll
probably put up a web page about this at some point..)

* Build a 2.2.x kernel (http://kernel.org/) -- I used 2.2.19pre16 --
with wireless support, but not with any drivers --
/usr/src/linux/.config should have:
CONFIG_NET_RADIO=y
* Compile & install said kernel -- on Debian do this:
make-kpkg --revision=custom.0 kernel-image
dpkg --install kernel-image-2.2.x_custom.0_i386.deb
* Compile & install PCMCIA card services
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/pcmcia-cs/). I needed a very small
patch to the Makefile concerning detection of man page locations
(remove the -c flag to the man command in the Configure script --
will provide a proper patch if I ever bother writing this up properly)
* Reboot with the new kernel
* Get a JDK installed -- I got 1.3 direct from Sun
(http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/download-linux.html)
* Download the Java Airport configurator -- apparently the Airport is
very similar indeed to the RG-1000
(http://edge.mcs.drexel.edu/GICL/people/sevy/airport/index.html)
* Put the RG-1000 and a computer on the same hub.
* Run the Java configurator as per the instructions, and hit "Discover
devices". This does an SNMP broadcast & gets the IP address of the
RG-1000. SNMP community name defaults to "public".
* Configure the computer on the hub to be in the same subnet as the
RG-1000, with an arbitrary (but different...) IP address.
* The configurator should now be able to retrieve the values from the
RG-1000. Set the values in the dialogs to what you actually want,
and hit "Update base station". I have turned encryption OFF for the
time being -- no data yet on how to get this working yet. The value
in encryption key 1 was 3361333830, which looks like hex encoding of
"s:3a380", which corresponds to the last five digits of the ID on
the RG-1000's ID sticker (23a380 in my case). Sinilarly I have left
the community name at "public" for the moment....
* Set the IP address of the computer back to the original value.
* Download and install the Wireless Extension tools -- I used version 21-pre5
(http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Tools.html)
* Remove ordinary ethernet card, insert wavelan card & configure using
iwconfig as per usual.

Any comments or additions to this would be greatly appreciated. I'll post again once I've got crypto sorted, but I think the back of this has been broken. Many thanks to all those who offered advice!

robin (at) aglet.net

Hi.
What is the IP address of the host that the Java Applet runs on? I guess it is in a completely different IP-Subnet than 153.69.254.254. Also, the message looks like you used the IP adress also as subnet mask, which is wrong. Subnet mask must be 255.255.255.0 for the default address.
I don't know the Java program's abilities. With the Windows version of the configurator you are able to change the IP address from the default value to something that is in your local subnet (without the need to read the configuration). Maybe this option is not available in the Java configurator. In this case you have to adjust your host's IP address to for example 153.69.254.253.
You can achieve this by the following command:
ifconfig eth0 153.69.254.253 up
Replace "eth0" with the network device that you are using, if this is not eth0. Now you should be able to configure the RG. It is important that you change the IP address within the configuration, else you would have to change the IP of the host every time you want to change the configuration or want to look at the statistics via SNMP.
After you have finished configuration, reenter the IP of your host with a similar command line as given above, or reboot your PC (it should then have its old IP back).
Hope that helps.
Bye, Mike

Hi.
The gold card is able to do the 40bit encryption, so this shouldn't be a problem. The only thing you have to have a look at is the length of the encryption key you use. If it is longer than 5 bytes (characters) because then the encryption strength of 128bit will be used.
Bye, Mike

Hi again.
Oh sorry, I forgot the second part of your mail. The SNMP community should be "public" (without "") and the default IP is 153.69.254.254 afair.
Bye, Mike

I had this problem too. Use the 6 character RG ID instead of public as the community name. This is on a sticker on the RG and is displayed when you discover devices: yours looks as if it is 23a380. This worked for me - I've only just got my RG a few weeks ago so perhaps it has changed recently or perhaps it is a difference between the Airport and the RG1000.

FYI, although this worked I haven't tried writing info back to the RG yet. In the end I installed the Java utility under Windows and copied the installed directories to a Linux partition and run this. This allows me to set the basic config from Linux, but the ISP bit doesn't work (it uses an embedded binary I think).

David

The Java configurator "just worked" for me over the wireless connection, which fortunately also "just worked." But I had a hard time making it work over ethernet. This made me nervous, I could easily lock my self out of the RG-1000!
The solution was to make sure that broadcasts to
255.255.255.255 were routed to my internal ethernet: route add 255.255.255.255 dev eth0 (assuming that the RG-1000 is connected to the network on eth0).
I tried to configure from a desktop PC which was connected to both the internet and the internal ethernet. So the broadcast went to the default route, which of course was to the internet.

I know a bit about the RG-1000, let me see if I can help.
The RG-1000 is designed to be your NAT box, you connect it directly to the Cable or DSL line, via its ethernet port, then connect all your internal machines to it via wireless. Using your own NAT box and then trying to use the RG-1000 as an access point behind is simply counter productive, it doesn't function like that very well. Its ability to act as a eth-wireless bridge is limited and problematic.
In its default state the ethernet port is alreay set to use dhcp, so you connect it to your cable or dsl box and it gets the IP assigned by your ISP, if your ISP uses static addresses you can set this up in the setup utility.
The wireless side should already be using 192.168.0.1, and the dhcp server should be on, assigning 192.168.0.2 through .254 to your wireless clients (no there is no way to change the range).
the 6 character ID on the bottom label is what you use as the network name when setting up your clients, this cannot be changed. encryption is turned on by default, and the default encryption key is the last 5 characters of the ID(ie: if your ID is 23a380, then the key would be 3a380).
If you use it as a wireless gateway to your net access, which is its design intent, it has the easiest and simplest setup of nearly any device I've seen.

Also since the ethernet port is intended to be on the public internet I belive that is why you are not supposed to be able to connect the setup utility to it via ethernet.

I've been trying to get my ORiNOCO WaveLan Silver card in my PCI PCMCIA adapter working without much luck as well. It detects the base station and the card works fine until I try to ping something on the wireless network. Thereafter it starts emitting the following in /var/log/messages exactly every 4 seconds:

Jul 15 12:48:41 ip9 kernel: NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth1: transmit timed out
Jul 15 12:48:41 ip9 kernel: wvlan_cs: eth1 Tx timed out! Resetting card
Jul 15 12:48:41 ip9 kernel: wvlan_cs: MAC address on eth1 is 00 02 2d 0b 46 d3

Any ideas on why this might be happening? I'm using Red Hat 7.1 kernel 2.4.2-2smp, here is my current settings:

% iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

eth1 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"0b495b" Nickname:"linux wireless"
Frequency:2.412GHz Sensitivity:1/3 Mode:Managed
Access Point: 00:02:2D:0B:49:5B
Bit Rate:2Mb/s RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:6234-3935-62
Power Management:off
Link quality:16/92 Signal level:-78 dBm Noise level:-94 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 invalid crypt:0 invalid misc:0

% route
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
192.168.1.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth1
127.0.0.0 * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo
default gateway.gte21.r 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0

% cat /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts
# Wireless LAN adapter configuration
#
# All the Wireless specific configuration is done through the Wireless
# Extensions, so we will just call 'iwconfig' with the right parameters
# defined below.
# Of course, you need to have iwconfig installled on your system.
# To download iwconfig, or for more info on Wireless Extensions :
# http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Tools.html
#
# Note : you don't need to fill all parameters, leave them blank, in most
# cases the driver will initialise itself with sane defaults values or
# automatically figure out the value... And not all drivers do support
# all settings...
#
# Adapted from the original pcmcia-cs version by Jean Tourrilhes <jt@hpl.hp.com>

case "$ADDRESS" in
*,*,*,*)
INFO="Lucent Orinoco WaveLan Network"
ESSID="0b495b"
# MODE="Ad-Hoc"
MODE="auto"
RATE="auto"
KEY="s:b495b"
;;
esac

I see that this has been quiet for a little while, I hope there are lurkers who can address this question for me:

I'm currently using the RG-1000 and a silver card in a Windows-oriented network. My laptop, which is one of those Compaq jobs that use a windmodem and miniPCI card for connectivity, can't support those devices running under Linux.

Because wireless support is more advanced in Linux these days (running RH7.2), I want to use the Orinoco card and RG-1000 as my ethernet card and modem on my laptop.

This begs the question: does the Airport java set-up utility support profile switching, so that I can switch from a LAN profile to a dial-up profile? I'd hate to have to boot into Windows just to switch this feature.

(Also, has anyone been able to access the local LAN while also configured to dial-up the modem?)

Thanks in advance.