Using Yast / ifup instead of network manager

How do you mannually set up a network using Yast/ifup? I’m trying to get my wireless running on a Broadcom 1390 WLAN. I’ve gone through the stickies in the wireless forum (this is my first stab at Linux) and have gotten the drivers installed and the internet working (albeit intermittently) using Knetwork manager. It seems that some folks that have had the same issue did not have problems setting the network up manually with Yast & ifup. I’ve disabled network manager in Yast, and I went through man ifup. It seems I need a “pre-configured interface,” but I don’t know how to make that happen. I’d appreciate any guidance on how to use ifup to connect. Thanks.

Here’s a tutorial for that: Configure a network card in Suse/openSUSE 11.x for Internet Access & wifi.

In short: YaST > Network devices > Network configurations. There you see the Global tab where you can switch. Then the other tabs for configuringthe device.

Help appreciated. Got the card configured, but I’m not able to use wireless still. This is what I get:

linux-8jrt:/home/cress # ifup wlan0
wlan0 name: BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN
DHCP4 client is already running on wlan0
IP address: 192.168.1.103/24

linux-8jrt:/home/cress # iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

wmaster0 no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:“robert”
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.452 GHz Access Point: 00:2G:1A:5F:9D:26
Bit Rate=1 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XX
Power Management:off
Link Quality=70/70 Signal level=-21 dBm Noise level=-70 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

Any thoughts on what is keeping it from connecting? Thanks.

You’ve got an IP address via DHCP so the wireless device is connected to the router (access point). You are literally “using wireless” if you get an IP address, and you’ve got one. I’m not sure what you mean when you say you’re “not able to use wireless yet”. What seems to be the problem?

I get, for example:

Unable to connect

Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at Google.

As swerdna says, that is something different. When you are connected to your router, your wirreless (or cable) is working and your NIC is configured.

When one can not connect to systems on the Internet, there may be several reasons.

. the router is gone, or not connected to the outside world. we will leave that for tthe moment;
. you can connect, but name serving (DNS) is not working. That means you can connect to 130.57.4.15, but not to forums.opensuse.org.
Try your browser with http://130.57.4.15 and see if you get these forums.

BTW, if you post computer output, please put them between CODE tags (by selecting the text and clicking on the # button in the bar above). This will keep the lay-out and avoid smileys.

The routes to and from the servers on the Internet are not being found by your computer. You need to add the gateway IP and the IPs of Name Servers. Name Servers allow plain language addresses like opensuse.swerdna.org to be converted to IP addresses like 121.210.244.222.

Have a look at the section “Adding Name Servers and a Gateway to your IP configuration” in this tutorial: Configure a network card in Suse/openSUSE 11.x for Internet Access & wifi.

It doesn’t seem to be a name server issue as I manually added those - and I get the same “unable to connect” message when I use the numeric IP address. I don’t think the router is a problem because I’m using it for several other computers - and it works for about 30 seconds when using Knetwork Manager.

Is there a diagnostic that I can run to see where this is getting derailed?

Thanks.

The references I get from google for the Broadcom 1390 in Linux are still using ndiswrapper, even the posts from 2010. I wonder if it’s such an old chip that ndiswrapper is all that will support it. Tell us more about your computer and its wireless device please. And also run this command:

/sbin/lspci -k -nn

I don’t want to see all the output, just the paragraph pertaining to you wireless card.

On 05/28/2010 07:16 PM, swerdna wrote:
>
> The references I get from google for the Broadcom 1390 in Linux are
> still using ndiswrapper, even the posts from 2010. I wonder if it’s such
> an old chip that ndiswrapper is all that will support it. Tell us more
> about your computer and its wireless device please. And also run this
> command:
> Code:
> --------------------
> /sbin/lspci -k
> --------------------
> I don’t want to see all the output, just the paragraph pertaining to you
> wireless card.

Drivers b43 and b43legacy support all the old chips, even though the
Broadcom wl driver does not. Thus one can use wl for the 802.11n devices
(for the moment) and b43/b43legacy for the rest.

0b:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN [14e4:4311] (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-Card [1028:0007]
        Kernel driver in use: b43-pci-bridge

The computer is on the older side - a Dell Inspiron e1505 / Core Duo, ~6 years old perhaps. I’ve seen a few threads about using ndiswrapper; that seemed to be necessary for Ubuntu, but the impression I got was that the broadcom driver should do the trick for Opensuse - and to some extent it does. With Knetwork manager, I can connect and check email using Kmail with no problem, it’s just the browsers that seem to be causing the issue.
Thanks.

On 05/28/2010 10:26 PM, kriskwo wrote:
>
> Code:
> --------------------
> 0b:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN [14e4:4311] (rev 01)
> Subsystem: Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-Card [1028:0007]
> Kernel driver in use: b43-pci-bridge

I have a BCM4311 that works with no problems. Whatever your difficulty,
it is not with the b43 driver, nor with NetworkManager. Once the
connection is established, NM simply gets out of the way. There is a lot
of misinformation on the Web.

BTW, in your second post, your interface had authenticated and
associated. Once you see the ESSID, AP MAC address and the encryption
key, the connection is ready. If you could not use it then, the problem
was with DNS or routing. There are lots of things to setup when using
ifup that are done for you with NM.

Please restore control with NM, then go to
http://www.linux-tips-and-tricks.de/index.php/, download the script
collectNWData.sh and run it. It will tell you what is wrong with your
setup. If you have questions about it, you can post the output with
pastebin.

When you can not connect using IP addresses, we could check for your routing. Post the ouput of:

netstat -rn

hcw, from netstat I get

linux-8jrt:/home/kriskwo/Download # netstat -rn
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags   MSS Window  irtt Iface
192.168.1.0     0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U         0 0          0 eth0
127.0.0.0       0.0.0.0         255.0.0.0       U         0 0          0 lo
0.0.0.0         192.168.1.1     0.0.0.0         UG        0 0          0 eth0

lwfinger, I ran that script and get an

!!! CND0110E: For the selected connection type there was no active network interface found on your system

Which is : “A network card was detected by the hardware. But Linux either can’t load the required hardware driver (module) or there are problems with the WLAN firmware.” This doesn’t seem to agree with iwconfig (I noted the script says it uses ifconfig) which gives me

wlan0     IEEE 802.11bg  ESSID:"robert"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.452 GHz  Access Point: 00:2A:52:E6:5B:72
          Bit Rate=1 Mb/s   Tx-Power=20 dBm
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xx
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=70/70  Signal level=-16 dBm  Noise level=-68 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

ifconfig gives me

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:16:CE:6B:7D:D0
          inet6 addr: fe80::216:ceff:fe6b:7dd0/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:23 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:6745 (6.5 Kb)

Thanks again for your time.

Whwn 192.168.1.1 is your router the routing table is OK.

My 10cents worth if your card is working correctly - stick with ifup and install WICD, do the set up through that rather than YAST.

Interestingly (and frustratingly) WICD works better - I think it gives me about twice the time that I get using network manager before it disconnects. But I’m still at under a minute of web usage. When it goes, for a few seconds afterwards the WICD menu shows no wireless connections. Then it repopulates and happily reconnects. It’s almost as if my network card is intermittently resetting.

Dumb suggestion, but, are you sure you arent using On-Demand connection?
Meaning, when your not using internet, it auto disconnects.