I’m having trouble getting a Motorola Netopia 3-D Reach wireless adapter to work under openSUSE 11.3. I’ve been through the two sticky posts in the Wireless area - Getting Your Wireless to Work and My wireless doesn’t work - a primer on what I should do next. I followed all the steps in both posts.
I have gotten to the point where the Access Point (AP), which is an AT&T uverse DSL modem/router, sees the computer. The computer is connected via an ethernet connection and the wireless connection. When I pull up the IP address of the AP, I can see that the router sees both the ethernet and the wireless connection and they are both active. But when I try to disconnect the wire for the ethernet connection, the browser no longer works and it can no longer see the router. I’ve tired rebooting with only the wireless adapter plugged in but I still connect wirelessly.
Is there some limitation that prevents an ethernet and a wireless to be active at the same time?
When the ethernet is disconnected, why isn’t the wireless adapter still working?
I’ve spent about 6 hours on this problem without finding a solution. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Normaly you should not have two connections to the same network. Also the default situation as seen by the designers is that when you have the faster cabled connection available, you would not need the wireless.
Only in the case the two connections are to different networks (a situation I cam imagin iin computer room like systems) a setup to have both working at the same time is needed.
The devs must have done a good job over the years. ATM I’m in the theatre, connected wireless as well as wired…Both connections are active, i.e. I can connect through ssh to both IP’s. I know that all traffic goes through the wired connection (which seems to be preferred), but the wireless is working.
I appreciate the feedback on this problem thus far. However, I’m not at a level of understanding in this area where I know how to apply the suggestions that have been offered. So I’ll add some more details about the problem and asking some additional questions.
Once it got both the ethernet and wireless attachments active on the router, I unplugged the ethernet cable at the router end and rebooted the computer. At this point I would have expected the computer to work through the wireless interface but it didn’t. I don’t understand why. Did the software still think it was attached to the ethernet interface because the wire was plugged into the back of the computer? Or (as an alternative) do I need to do something in YaST2 under Network Devices → Network Settings to make the wireless work or recognize that the ethernet connection is not attached?
I understand (should have realized) that I couldn’t have 2 connections to the same router using ethernet and wireless. However, how would I go about letting “your router table decide” as hcvv suggested in the post prior to this one?
In any case, when you are testing (by removing cables, rebooting, etc.) all sorts of combinations (which I think is a good way to find out more about the problem), for every combination you should take down:
. what the situation is (un))plugged, rebooted, etc.;
. what you see that works or works not;
.* /sbin/ifconfig -a* output;
.* netstat -r *output;
Thus you and we can see what the situation is in the system.
Also listings of the files /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth0 and* /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-wlan0 *might give us a clue about what is configurated.
P.S. When you have two interfaces to the same network, the routing table decides what is used for what. Thus the netstat -r.
Go into the network module in yast and you can adjust when the nics are activated. For the wired nic, tell it to activate when the cable is plugged in rather than on boot. If it’s active, wireless will be deactivated. Once you get the proper settings in yast it should work fine.
