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Debian Sarge + madwifi : cannot bring up interface ath0



Hello,

I am running Debian Sarge on a Pentium 4 laptop with kernels
2.6.8-2-386, 2.6.8-2-686 and 2.6.8-2-686-smp. My difficulties with
wireless networking are identical with all three kernels. I apologize
in advance if this message is a bit long; I hope to provide useful
diagnostics.

I have a Netgear WG511T PCMCIA wireless adapter. It has an Atheros
chipset and thus I use madwifi. I am having difficulties bringing the
interface up. I initially had the ethernet port eth0 defined as 'auto'
in /etc/network/interfaces. If the laptop is not connected when I
boot, I endlessly receive the message:

r8169: eth0: Reset RTL8169s PHY

which is annoying (the built-in ethernet controller is a RealTek
RTL-8169 Gigabit Ethernet). I thus edited /etc/network/interfaces and
commented out the 'auto eth0' (is there a bette way around this?). Now
I just bring eth0 up or down using ifup/ifdown---this is great.

Regarding the wireless card, I installed the madwifi drivers, loaded
the modules, but 'ifup ath0' gives:

% ifup ath0
Error for wireless request "Set ESSID" (8B1A) :
    SET failed on device ath0 ; No such device.
Internet Software Consortium DHCP Client 2.0pl5
Copyright 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999 The Internet Software Consortium.
All rights reserved.

Please contribute if you find this software useful.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/dhcp-contrib.html

sit0: unknown hardware address type 776
eth1: unknown hardware address type 24
ath0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device
sit0: unknown hardware address type 776
eth1: unknown hardware address type 24
Bind socket to interface: No such device
exiting.
Failed to bring up ath0.

% dmesg | grep 'ath0'
(nothing)

% lsmod | grep 'ath'
ath_pci                63104  0
ath_rate_onoe           8840  1 ath_pci
ath_hal               148592  1 ath_pci
wlan                  121308  2 ath_pci,ath_rate_onoe

% lsmod | grep 'yenta'
yenta_socket           21728  0
pcmcia_core            70868  2 ds,yenta_socket

% lsmod | grep 'hotplug'
pci_hotplug            34640  2 shpchp,pciehp

and the wireless card doesn't show up in 'lspci'. Similarly, 'cardctl
status' says there is no card in the socket (there is!). 'cardctl
stop/insert' doesn't help.

A couple questions:

(a) What are these interfaces eth1 and sit0 with unknown addresses?
(b) Is the pcmcia and/or hotplug modules at fault?

My /etc/network/interfaces is as follows;

----------------------------------------
% cat /etc/network/interfaces
# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
#auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

# PCMCIA wireless adapter
iface ath0 inet dhcp
        wireless-essid <my-essid>

# Get the wireless adapter to hotplug
mapping hotplug
        script grep
        map ath0
----------------------------------------

Only one led is blinking on the wireless adapter.

Now if I have the wireless adapter inserted before I boot and if 'auto
eth0' is enabled, the card is powered, the interface comes up, it
picks up the correct ESSID, but I never receive any IP address via
DHCP from my home wireless router (which is configured with dhcp). I
see messages witnessing attempts from DHCPDISCOVER to receive an
offer, which never happens. I disabled WEP and WAP, so access should
be wide open.

I don't have ifplugd, netenv, waproamd or wap_supplicant. (should I?)
Documentation doesn't seem to help, but I may very well have missed
something.

What am I missing here? Why can't I hotplug the card?
I very much appreciate any help. Thanks in advance,
Dominique



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