Link-sys WPC11 Mini-HOWTO

1. Preliminaries

2. WARNING ABOUT WPC11 VERSION 4

The NEW WPC11 CARDS HAVE Realtek 8180 CHIPSET INSTEAD OF THE RTL8180. Thanks to Juan Natera for clarification

It had come to my attention that the new version, Version 4 are not compatible with my old instructions. I include a set of instruction provided by bill atkins

Until I can clean this up, I include Bill atkins email for sake of urgency

Quote from Bill Atkins

OK.

First of all, make sure you have a V4 card. Type

cardctl ident

RealTek RTL8180L

If not, then you can probably just follow the rest of the instructions in the HOWTO.

Now you need to get drivers for the card. Go to RealTek's download AND do a search fo 8180 from the downloads section

or you can download the driver that works with Bill's email at

ftp://152.104.125.40/cn/wlan/rtl8180l/rtl8180_24x_suse82.zip

and pick up the drivers for SuSE (you don't need to be running SuSE for the drivers to work - I used them with Gentoo. However, the other divers don't seem to work at all).

Unpack the incoming tarball. As of this writing, there is a minor bug in the driver code that must be repaired in order to make the card work.

Open up r8180_type.h.

On line 128, you'll see a line with two slashes before the text. Remove these slashes. Now you're ready to build.

At the shell prompt, type make. The drivers will build themselves. If there are any problems making the drivers, open up the Makefile and check the kernel version settings on the first few lines.

Now open up the wlanup file.

Uncomment line 5 (remove the #) and change the SSID to the SSID of your network.

Uncomment line 8 and set the ssid2scan to your network's SSID. Uncomment line 9 and set the networktype to infra (unless you really are using adhoc). Save your changes.

Now eject the card

cardctl eject

From the directory where you unpacked the drivers, type

insmod -f rtl8180_24x.o

You will get a warning - ignore it.

Now run the wlanup script found in the driver package. Your card should now appear when you type ifconfig. You should configure your IP address at this point. If you use DHCP, just type "dhcpd wlan0". Try pinging google.com. You should get replies back. If so, your card is working!

Now copy rtl8180_24x.o to /lib/modules/YOURKERNELNAME, where YORUKERNELNAME is the name of the directory in /lib/modules.

Then copy the wlanup and wlandown scripts to /sbin.

3. Link-sys WPC11 install on Debian

apt-get install pcmcia-source

apt-get install pcmcia-cs

apt-get install wireless-tools

apt-get install pump

apt-get install kernel-package

bzip2 -dc patch-2.4.21-pre3.bz2 | patch -p0

apt-get install DHCP-client

pump -i eth0

pump -i wlan0

apt-get install kernel-package

4. Debian Kernel Configuration

make menuconfig

---

4.2. What NOT to Enable

One of the main stumbling blocks was to realize that the pcmcia support in the kernel is not as good as the pcmcia-source support that one gets when you build it from pcmcia-source.

I use either

make xconfig

or

make menuconfig

to configure my kernel, so when you configure your kernel, be sure to not have pcmcia support enabled under

General setup

Nor do you want to select any particular pcmcia card under

Network device support

. I repeat you do not want this under the kernel and you will be building it when you download pcmcia-source.

Be sure to download all the necessary components before you take pcmcia support out of the kernel, otherwise, if you were using a pcmcia card for net access, you will not be able to connect to the Internet using the new kernel, until you have built both pcmcia support and module drivers for the wireless card

5. Building PCMCIA-SOURCE

Download pcmcia-source, by typing

apt-get install pcmcia-source

/usr/src

pcmcia-cs.tar.gz

You now need to gunzip the file by

gunzip pcmcia-cs.tar.gz

tar xvf pcmcia-cs.tar

You should see pcmcia-source unpacked into the directory

/usr/src/modules/pcmcia-cs

6. Using make-kpkg to build the new kernel and pcmcia-source modules

Steps to build the kernel

• Be sure the pcmcia-source is under /usr/src/modules.

• Go ahead and configure your kernel and be sure that pcmcia support IS NOT compiled in as an option in the kernel.

• To build the kernel and pcmcia-source, be sure you are under the

  /usr/src/linux

  or have a symbolic link from /usr/src/linux pointing to whatever kernel source you have set up.

• Type

  make-kpkg clean

  to clean

• Then type

  make-kpkg --revision=custom.1.0 kernel_image modules_image

The kernel_image option will build the kernel while the modules_image option will build all modules located under

/usr/src/modules/

After some chugging, go up one level to

/usr/src

kernel-image-2.4.19-pre4_custom.1.0_i386.deb
pcmcia-modules-2.4.19-pre4_3.1.31-7+custom.1.0_i386.deb

You first want to install the kernel image so you would type

dpkg -i kernel-image-etc....

Now install the modules by typing

dpkg -i pcmcia-modules.etc...

There are a couple of assumptions that make-kpkg makes about your lilo.conf file. One is that you have not radically changed it. Make-kpgk will make symbolics links from '/boot' where the actual kernel resides to 'vmlinuz' which is under '/'. In other words, under '/', you will see vmlinuz and vmlinuz.old which are symbolic links to the real kernel images under /boot/. Anyway if you have any questions ask me.

7. Wlan Drivers for You Link-Sys Card

You have downloaded the 11 Wlan project. Go a head and read the instruction, and put it under modules. Follow the instructions when you

make config

/usr/src/modules/pcmcia-cs

Go ahead and

make all

make install

I suggest you read the documentation that comes with it, but essentially, if you have a WAP that is connected to your DSL or cable modem then you have a infrastructure set up. I found that it was best to edit the

networks.opt

/etc/pcmcia

To make things easier edit the option

# Use DHCP (via /sbin/dhcpcd, /sbin/dhclient, or /sbin/pump)? [y/n]
DHCP="y"

The documentation talks about setting ESSID but when you edit the

wlan-ng.opts

#=======INFRASTRUCTURE STATION START===================
# SSID is all we have for now
AuthType="opensystem"           # opensystem | sharedkey (requires WEP)
DesiredSSID="howardnet"

From what I can gather,DesiredSSID means ESSID and it works when the WAP and link-sys pcmcia card share the same name.

At this point, you should reboot and should have a working link-sys card that gets its address via DHCP.

8. Checking things in case they don't work

1. Be sure to type

ifconfig

You should something like this

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:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:06:25:A8:AE:64
          inet addr:192.168.1.104  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:35197 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:57676 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
          RX bytes:43386657 (41.3 MiB)  TX bytes:2670811 (2.5 MiB)
          Interrupt:3 Base address:0x100

The keys point here are that inet addr:has a real IP address, and that Bcast and Netmask are set up such that they are on the same "wave-length" as your Wireless Access Point.

2. If you don't, you might have had the same problem i did which was that there was no easy script to initiate the wlan0 device setup. That is to say, if the card was recognized but you still did not get a connection and say that ifconfig showed wlan0 present but with no IP address. In other words, you might see something like this:

text:/home/dude# ifconfig

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:14 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:14 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:700 (700.0 b)  TX bytes:700 (700.0 b)

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:06:25:A8:AE:64
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:1 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
          RX bytes:46 (46.0 b)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
          Interrupt:3 Base address:0x100

As you can see, the interface device, the Wireless pcmcia card, is noted, but there is no inet addr. The pcmcia software recognized the card, but it has not successfully connected with the Wireless Access Point.

I used the command,pump to send a simple DHCP request to the DHCP server for the device in question. I used

pump -i wlan0

You can get the pump by

apt-get install pump

While I needed to use

pump -i wlan0

9. Wireless tools

While it is not necessary to include this in your kernel configuration, you can enable Wireless tool extensions by going (i assume you use xconfig or menuconfig) to

Network device support

Wireless LAN (non-hamradio)

Hermes chipset 802.11b support (Orinoco/Prism2/Symbol)

iwconfig

iwspy

The one thing I found this good for is that by repeated typing iwconfig, you can see your Link Quality. Its quite good

10. RedHat Installation

This is a summary of what Mr.Tony Perrie of involution.com fame has wriiten. I include here with his permission. I encourage you to visit his site because he has a great "how-to" on IPtables.

modprobe orinoco_cs

lsmod | egrep lan

rmmod wavelan_cs

rmmod wvlan_cs

/etc/pcmcia/hermes.conf.

service pcmcia restart

service network restart

11. Wireless Access Point

Perhaps its it missing the forest for the trees, but I did not spend any discussion setting up the actual Wireless Access Point. The reason is that the documentation that comes with the WAP is well written. The only thing I haven't spoken about is enabling Wireless Encryption Protocol in the WAP (Wireless Access Point) which I really don't suggest as I don't think WEP has been properly set up in the drivers for the Pcmcia Wireless Cards. However, let me know if you have any problems and I will be glad to help.

12. Request for comments

I will be glad to help anyone out and if things are a bit confusing in this quite mini how to, please tell me how I can fix it to make it better.

Thanks!