3com Wireless Networkcard under RedHat 8

I am trying to install my wireless network card on my laptop and have
spent many many hours of frustration. I've looked in all the obvious
places for help. So any ideas gratefully received.

Details: 3com OfficeConnect crshpw796 802.11 network card on HP xe4500
running RedHat 8.

I downloaded the drivers from the ADMtek web site, and made the driver
without any problems. I do an insmod and the light on the network
card comes on and starts flashing happily. I try do do sensible things
with network configuration (see below for the output of ifconfig)
and there are no obvious problems. But the link light does not come
on, and nor does networking.

I have tried to use iwconfig (see output) but I can't see anything
obvious to do. iwlist says no access points in range.

If I boot up in Windows it all works beautifully.

Any ideas (please)

Thanks

Scott




Output of ifconfig

eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0B:AC:E6:50:BB
inet addr:146.141.29.181 Bcast:146.141.255.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:2 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:182 errors:171 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:150 (150.0 b) TX bytes:11640 (11.3 Kb)
Interrupt:5 Base address:0x4000


Output of iwconfig

eth1 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"" Nickname:""
NWIDff/any Mode:Ad-Hoc Frequency:2.412GHz
Cell: 02:91:F2:2C:91:00 Bit Rate=11Mb/s Tx-Power=47 dBm
Sensitivity:0/65535
Retry limit:3 RTS thr=2346 B Fragment thr=2346 B
Encryption keyff
Power Managementff
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

Scott Hazelhurst wrote:
>
> I am trying to install my wireless network card on my laptop and have
> spent many many hours of frustration. I've looked in all the obvious
> places for help. So any ideas gratefully received.
>
> Details: 3com OfficeConnect crshpw796 802.11 network card on HP xe4500
> running RedHat 8.
>
> I downloaded the drivers from the ADMtek web site, and made the driver
> without any problems. I do an insmod and the light on the network
> card comes on and starts flashing happily. I try do do sensible things
> with network configuration (see below for the output of ifconfig)
> and there are no obvious problems. But the link light does not come
> on, and nor does networking.
>
> I have tried to use iwconfig (see output) but I can't see anything
> obvious to do. iwlist says no access points in range.
>
> If I boot up in Windows it all works beautifully.
>
> Any ideas (please)
>
> Thanks
>
> Scott
>
>
>
>
> Output of ifconfig
>
> eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0B:AC:E6:50:BB
> inet addr:146.141.29.181 Bcast:146.141.255.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
> UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
> RX packets:2 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
> TX packets:182 errors:171 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
> collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
> RX bytes:150 (150.0 b) TX bytes:11640 (11.3 Kb)
> Interrupt:5 Base address:0x4000
>
>
> Output of iwconfig
>
> eth1 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"" Nickname:""
> NWIDff/any Mode:Ad-Hoc Frequency:2.412GHz
> Cell: 02:91:F2:2C:91:00 Bit Rate=11Mb/s Tx-Power=47 dBm
> Sensitivity:0/65535
> Retry limit:3 RTS thr=2346 B Fragment thr=2346 B
> Encryption keyff
> Power Managementff
> Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
> Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
> Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
>

Have you compared the iwconfig report above to the settings your windows
machine uses on this card? It could be that you need to adjust your
sensitivity, tx power, frequency/channel, etc. You may also want to
check out:
http://www.ostenfeld.k-net.dk/~bolind/3comwlan/

HTH
Neil

--
/************************************************** *
*Neil Horman
*Software Engineer
*Red Hat, Inc., www.redhat.com
*gpg keyid: 1024D / 0x92A74FA1
*http://www.keyserver.net
************************************************** */

Neil Horman <(E-Mail Removed)> writes:
> Have you compared the iwconfig report above to the settings your
> windows machine uses on this card? It could be that you need to
> adjust your sensitivity, tx power, frequency/channel, etc.


Thanks for the response. I have tried, but I'll look at this again.


> You may
> also want to check out:
> http://www.ostenfeld.k-net.dk/~bolind/3comwlan/

I had seen this, and it is useful though it is for other versions of
the 3com card which use a different chipset (atml rather than admtek).

Further update: something I hadn't spotted before is that after
activating the card the following messages get written to
/var/log/messages in an endless loop

Oct 25 01:21:37 carmel kernel: set channel 12
Oct 25 01:21:37 carmel kernel: set channel 13
Oct 25 01:21:37 carmel kernel: set channel 14
Oct 25 01:21:37 carmel kernel: set channel 1
Oct 25 01:21:37 carmel kernel: set channel 2
Oct 25 01:21:37 carmel kernel: set channel 3
Oct 25 01:21:38 carmel kernel: set channel 4
Oct 25 01:21:38 carmel kernel: set channel 5
Oct 25 01:21:38 carmel kernel: set channel 6
Oct 25 01:21:38 carmel kernel: set channel 7
....
....
....

I'll look at all the settings again and try to work through it from
scratch.

Thanks for the pointers.

Scott