Toshiba Satellite Pro 6100

Hello everyone,

I am having trouble using the internal wireless LAN Mini PCI card in my Satellite Pro notebook. I am running SuSE Pro 9.0 and have no other problems - I love SuSE on my laptop!!

When I am connected to my router using the RJ-45 jack w/ patch cable, DNS is not an issue and I can browse the Internet (traverse my NAT to the WAN). When I use the internal wireless card, I can only browse my LAN and cannot access the Internet. I've checked every setting on my LAN and my other PCs and servers, but the only time I have trouble is when I try the wireless card using SuSE. In fact, I use the same exact configuration that works while I'm booted into Windows (laptop is dual-boot).

I notice there is no specific driver for the internal wireless card - - only for PCMCIA or PCI cards (Cisco, SMC, etc.)

It would be a shame to have to buy a PCMCIA wireless card for a laptop with built-in wireless - but I will if I have to.

Can anyone help?

Thank you in advance!

Do you know who makes the wireless card? If you still have windows installed, you can check in there. Otherwise you might be able to find out through dmesg at the konsole.

The Windows System Information shows the following:
==
Toshiba Wireless LAN Mini PCI Card

Driver Details
Provider: Lucent Technologies
File version: 7.42.0.300
Copyright: 2001 Agere Systems Inc.
==

In Linux. running dmesg in Konsole shows the Intel PRO/100 on eth(0).
I didn't see any reference to the wlan.

Thanks!

So... let me get this straight.

You've got built in Ethernet, which works fine. You also have WIFI, which works, but no DNS.

1) How did you set up your WIFI, or was it auto-set up for you?
2) When you're running WIFI, is your Ethernet card enabled or disabled?
3) Can you start up a terminal for me, switch to root, and then post the feedback of iwconfig and ifconfig?

Looking at the system specs for the Toshiba Satellite Pro 6100, under Downloads it says Atheros driver for WinXP/2000, so what SuSE will probably set the card up as "ath_0" or "ath0".

~~ Andrew D.
linuxnoob@wi.rr.com

So... let me get this straight.

You've got built in Ethernet, which works fine. You also have WIFI, which works, but no DNS.

Correct.

1) How did you set up your WIFI, or was it auto-set up for you?

I configured the WiFi using YaST. I tried both the default configuration, which is DHCP, and manually entering the appropriate information. The results are the same; I cannot access the WAN/Internet.


2) When you're running WIFI, is your Ethernet card enabled or disabled?

I have not disabled the Ethernet card while trying to use wlan. Should I try this?

3) Can you start up a terminal for me, switch to root, and then post the feedback of iwconfig and ifconfig?

Yes indeed

Here is the feedback for iwconfig:

lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"ichiban" Nickname:"webdog"
Mode:Ad-Hoc Frequency:2.437GHz Cell: 00:12:17:11:94:25
Bit Rate:11Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm Sensitivity:1/3
Retry limit:4 RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Encryption keyff
Power Managementff

sit0 no wireless extensions.

Here is the feedback for ifconfig:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:00:39:37:A4:E7
inet addr:192.168.1.105 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::200:39ff:fe37:a4e7/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:29 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:18 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:6899 (6.7 Kb) TX bytes:2216 (2.1 Kb)
Interrupt:11 Base address:0xdf40 Memory:fceff000-fceff038

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:118 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:118 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:9604 (9.3 Kb) TX bytes:9604 (9.3 Kb)


Looking at the system specs for the Toshiba Satellite Pro 6100, under Downloads it says Atheros driver for WinXP/2000, so what SuSE will probably set the card up as "ath_0" or "ath0".

Hmm... I didn't see a reference to "ath_0" or "ath0." Should I try to apply these manually?

Thank you!
Dan

Well, that's not what I asked for, but I will comment on your post.

I ran iwconfig and noticed the configuraiton is incorrect. The wireless settings were configured to use an Orinoco PCMCIA card on a wireless LAN I logged into several months ago. This makes absolutely no sense to me as I changed these settings to the previous configuraiton as soon as I returned to my office the following day.

That could be problem, but I'm thinking it may have more to do with the ethernet being on at the same time the WIFI is. You may try to reconfigure your WIFI settings for the integrated wireless using iwconfig, and see if that helps.

I tried to reconfigure the settings and use the internal card instead of the PCMCIA (Orinoco), but had no success, so I simply deleted the wireless configuration altogether.

Okay.

I noticed afterward that the Orinoco card still appears in the /etc/modules.conf file. Is this a default value?

You may comment that out of the /etc/modules.conf if you would like to. It won't hurt anything either way.

~~ Andrew D.
linuxnoob@wi.rr.com

Oh... I think we may have posted at the same time. I edited my previous post - please see above.
Thanks again!

Thank you for responding, although I would prefer you just post afterwards and not edit your previous post, mkay? Keeps me from getting lost in the convo, when I can't look back and see what I was referencing.

I have not disabled the Ethernet card while trying to use wlan. Should I try this?

Give it a shot. People have had issues with Linux (not just SuSE) trying to find DHCP or DNS names from ethernet when it should be looking to the WIFI card. Try turning that off in YaST and seeing what happens.

---------------------------
As far as IWCONFIG and IFCONFIG go, they look all right... but I notice that you're in Ad-Hoc mode, not Managed mode. Do you use a router, or is your network Ad-Hoc? Because if you DO use a router, it hasn't picked up on it, and thus, not on DNS.

You could run iwlist wlan0 scan as root to see what's in your vincinity as far as WIFI connections go.

And you can change it to Managed by typing iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed, should that be what you need.

-----------------------------

Hmm... I didn't see a reference to "ath_0" or "ath0." Should I try to apply these manually?

Nope. According to iwconfig, your card is wlan0 not ath0, which is okay. I just wanted to know if the card had been picked up.

-----------------------------
One other thing you could try is running ifconfig wlan0 up and then dhcpcd (in that order) as root. That would register the interface with ifconfig (which is helpful to check for transmission errors), and DHCPCD reconnects to your router and reaquires the IP address and the DNS servers.

-----------------------------
Something to post:
When your card is on, and connected to the LAN, what is inside /etc/resolv.conf?

~~ Andrew D.
linuxnoob@wi.rr.com

Sorry about that. No more top-posting

I tried disabling the eth card - no change.

As far as IWCONFIG and IFCONFIG go, they look all right... but I notice that you're in Ad-Hoc mode, not Managed mode. Do you use a router, or is your network Ad-Hoc? Because if you DO use a router, it hasn't picked up on it, and thus, not on DNS.
- -
...And you can change it to Managed by typing iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed, should that be what you need.

I do use a router and it is running DHCP and NAT. I switched to Managed mode and my wlan0 interface came to life!!
I'm getting closer...

Something to post:
When your card is on, and connected to the LAN, what is inside /etc/resolv.conf?

This is what it shows:

search local
nameserver 68.87.66.XXX
nameserver 68.87.64.XXX

Perhaps it loaded these addresses when I had the cable connected?

I do use a router and it is running DHCP and NAT. I switched to Managed mode and my wlan0 interface came to life!!

All right, we're making progress!

Do you know what your ISP's nameservers are? Because those may or may not be accurate. Here's what mine looks like:

search wi.rr.com
nameserver 192.168.0.1

Here's what those things mean...

 * * * search
 * * * * * * *Search list for host-name lookup. *The search list *is *normally
 * * * * * * *determined *from *the local domain name; by default, it contains
 * * * * * * *only the local domain name. *This may be changed by listing *the
 * * * * * * *desired *domain *search *path *following the search keyword with
 * * * * * * *spaces or tabs separating the names. *Most resolver queries will
 * * * * * * *be *attempted *using *each *component of the search path in turn
 * * * * * * *until a match is found. *Note that this process may be slow *and
 * * * * * * *will *generate *a *lot of network traffic if the servers for the
 * * * * * * *listed domains are not local, and that queries will time out *if
 * * * * * * *no server is available for one of the domains.

 * * * * * * *The search list is currently limited to six domains with a total
 * * * * * * *of 256 characters.

 * * * nameserver
 * * * * * * *Internet *address *(in *dot *notation) of a name server that the
 * * * * * * *resolver should query. *Up to MAXNS (currently 3) *name *servers
 * * * * * * *may *be listed, one per keyword. *If there are multiple servers,
 * * * * * * *the resolver library queries them in the order *listed. * If *no
 * * * * * * *nameserver *entries *are present, the default is to use the name
 * * * * * * *server on the local machine. *(The algorithm used is *to *try *a
 * * * * * * *name server, and if the query times out, try the next, until out
 * * * * * * *of name servers, then repeat trying all the name servers until a
 * * * * * * *maximum number of retries are made.)

In this case, I've taken my ISP's DNS information, and hard-coded it into my router (cuz my router has a section for that). Then, I told my computer to search my ISP for nameservers, or use the ones hard-coded into the router. It usually does the ones I've hard-coded into the router.

So check up to see if your ISP's DNS servers actually are those IPs you gave me. If they aren't, you might need to do some router re-configging.

~~ Andrew D.
linuxnoob@wi.rr.com