I've been trying to figure out why wireless seems to behave so weird on both RedHat and Mandrake. This has been an on-going problem. I got rid of RedHat because I've had better success with Mandrake. I'm currently running ML 9.0 on my server and 9.1 on the notebook.
On the server box, I'm using a Cisco Aironet 350 for my internet (not intranet) connection. It usually works OK but on some reboots or network restarts, the configuration changes and an old SSID shows up. I once used MCC to configure the parameters so I'm wondering if MCC created config files other than /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 and /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts. On the notebook, I'm running a Netgear MA401. It works great when booted to the Windows 2000 partition but I've had a lot of trouble getting the card to use WEP on the Linux partition. I got WEP working but a reboot or network restart won't enable the WEP. If I execute the command iwconfig eth0 key <somekey>, the WEP works. I have WIRELESS_ENC_KEY="somekey" line in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 and I have the key listed in /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts. I remarked out the line from ifcfg-eth0 but that didn't help. Then I unremarked that line and removed the key value in wireless.opts. That didn't help. The only way I've been able to get the WEP to consistently work is by executing the appropriate iwconfig command in /etc/rc.local (that doesn't help on a network reboot though). I plan to eventually get away from WEP and use VPN instead. Until I learn more about VPN, I still need to find a way to make my system consistent with WEP. If a firmware upgrade comes out for this card so that I can use WPA, I might go with that. It depends on which encryption method is easiest to configure and which is the most secure. Actually, configuring wireless stuff on Linux is a mystery. I haven't seen any documentation that clearly explains how to install and configure wireless cards. BTW, I've even tried using linux-wlan-ng-0.2.0 with no real success (I continue to have problems with WEP). As time goes by, I get closer to a "correct" solution to my problem. But, why can't there be a step-by-step instruction for installing wireless devices? At least provide a complete list of configuration files that details their use and how they interact with other files. For example, how does /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 interact with /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts and /etc/pcmcia/network.opts? Should I configure ifcfg-eth0 with the wireless parameters or should I configure wireless.opts? Without experimenting (and possibly crashing your system), how is one to know which is correct? See what I mean?
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