Baslinux mailing list

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Greetings,

Sindi and Steven, thank you both for your replies to my inquiry
several weeks ago regarding configuring a Linksys WPC11 v3 PCMCIA
wireless card.

I have spent some time working on this and the card seems to be
functioning correctly now with the wvlan_cs module.  I get the two
high beeps when I run /etc/pcmcia/start and I have gotten my
networking configuration to the point where I am able to get a
response when pinging other PCs on the network.

I have run into several new issues, one of which in particular is
driving me crazy.  Been researching, reading posts, etc., as I always
do before asking a question, but am again stuck.

BTW, Sindi, the only machines I have with internet connectivity right
now all use Outlook 2007, so I can't change to a text editor for
composing emails.  Sending this one from GMail website instead (in
plain text mode), hoping there will be less crap attached.  Sorry in
advance if there's still formatting garbage.

Issues are as follows:

1)  Can't use "udhcpc" - when I try to run it, it returns "info,
udhcpc (v0.9.9-pre) started", then "warning, could not load seed from
/dev/urandom: No such file or directory", then 3 lines of "debug,
sending discover...".  Am I missing something here?  Should I have a
/dev/urandom directory?  I don't.  I saw one reference to this in old
posts, but no resolution.

2)  I placed my iwconfig line in /etc/rc to try to get it to configure
the wireless network options at system startup, but it seems to have
no effect.  Even when I try to manually use the iwconfig command to
configure wireless network options, it doesn't seem to "take" for
awhile.  For example, I try to set the ESSID, using command "iwconfig
eth0 ESSID on ESSID "[network name]" freq 2.462G".  The "on" command
seems to be necessary for it to set the ESSID on my machine for some
reason - don't know if that's how it's supposed to work.  When I then
run "iwconfig" by itself, it shows the ESSID to be "+A" (there's a dot
in front of the "+A" that is centered vertically - I can't even
recreate the character in this email).  Anyway, after a period of
maybe 10-15 minutes and several tries, the command I've given above
seems to work, and suddenly "iwconfig" by itself shows my network ID,
as well as the correct MAC address for the wireless interface of my
router.  Do you have any thoughts on where I could place this command
to make it run effectively at startup?  Note that I have placed
/etc/pcmcia/start in my /etc/rc file prior to the iwconfig line,
assuming I had to establish functionality of the wireless card before
trying to configure wireless networking.  In addition, even though
I've turned encryption off on the router for testing purposes and am
not even trying to set an encryption key in my iwconfig line, I often
see various random numbers following the "invalid enc" portion of the
iwconfig readout.

3)  Although I seem to connect to my wireless network and I get a
response to ping from other PCs on the network (and can ping the
baslinux PC by IP from other PCs), I can't get internet connectivity.
Since udhcpc doesn't work for me, I've used ifconfig to set a static
IP (192.168.1.44) for interface eth0 (the wireless PCMCIA card), I've
run "route add default gw 192.168.1.1 eth0" to set the default gateway
to the wireless router's IP, and I've edited the /etc/resolv.conf file
to read "nameserver 192.168.1.1", since the router also serves DNS on
my network (I have also tried setting public nameserver IPs 4.2.2.1
and 4.2.2.2 in this file, but with no effect).  Although I don't think
it matters, I've edited /etc/hosts to reflect correct hostnames and
IPs for all devices on my network.  Long story short, my router at
192.168.1.1 doesn't respond to ping from the baslinux machine
(although it does respond to ping from all the other PCs), and I can't
access anything on the internet by name or by IP, but all other
devices on my network respond to pings to their IPs (192.168.1.2, .4,
.5, etc).

I am completely perplexed by this, especially the internet
connectivity issue.  Normally, I'm pretty good at networking
configurations (in Windows), and am probably missing something
perfectly simple here that I'm just not used to doing since I don't
know Linux.  I've tried to do the research and figure this out on my
own, but am again at a loss, so if you all have any input on any of
the above issues I'm having, I would greatly appreciate the
assistance.

Again, thanks so much (and sorry for the long email)!