Setting up the Hardware

This page contains infromation on how to set up your WaveLan wireless network adapter to use it with the wireless network in the Gates Computer Science Building. How this works mainly depends on which operating system you use. Currently we have instructions for: If you are using it with another operating system please let us know so we can include the information here. If your hardware allready works go to the SPINACH pages.


Windows 95


The installation should be easy as Window's plug-and-play architecture can identify the WaveLAN card and install the drivers automatically. After installing the drivers check in the control panel in network that the hardware driver exists. It should look like the entry in the requester to the right. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


Next select the WaveLan Driver Properties and check in the advanced section that the parameters that the parameters are set to the values to the right. It does not matter to what the Station ID and Station name are set to.

To test if your windows hardware installation worked you can use the diagnostic utility that is included on the disk that comes with the WaveLan card.

:Parameter Value
Domain ID 0001
Beacon Key 0000
Encryption Disabled
Roaming Enabled
 

LINUX

For Linux there exist two very different drivers for the old 2MBit/s Wavelan cards and the new IE 802.11 (usually 10 MBit/s) WaveLan cards.

New 10 MBit/s WaveLan Cards

These are the cards without the cable to the external antenna. The drivers and instructions on how to install them can be found at http://www.fasta.fh-dortmund.de/users/andy/wvlan/.

Roaming should work with these drivers.

Old 2 MBit/s WaveLan Cards

The WaveLAN drivers in the current Linux kernels seem to be broken and roaming probably won't work. What you will have to do is find out the Network ID of your local access point and set it with the ipwconf tool.

There is a patch for older versions of the Linux Kernel that allows roaming. Here are the instructions on how to compile and install a Linux kernel and PCMCIA drivers so that your system will work properly. First you have to build a version of the kernel with wireless networking enabled.

Get a version of the Linux kernel. (here's a link to a 2.0.33 kernel)

  1. Configure the kernel so that it supports Radio Interfaces (if you do a "make xconfig", it's the "Radio network interfaces" option in the "Network device support" sub-menu).
  2. Go to the source directory and build the kernel by typing:

  3.  make dep; make clean; make zImage
  4. Install your kernel wherever it is best for you (for example: cp arch/boot/i386/zImage /zImage.wireless).
  5. Edit /etc/lilo.conf  so that there's an entry pointing to zImage.wireless.
  6. Run "lilo".
  7. Run "make modules" to compile the loadable modules.
  8. Run "make modules_install" to install the modules.  Your kernel should be fully installed now.
If you have problems building the kernel have a look at the Linux Kernel Howto.
  1. Get the PCMCIA drivers with the patch to allow roaming (here's a link to a patched 3.0.4)
  2. Configure the drivers (make config).  Make sure that you give the proper path to the kernel that you compiled and installed in steps 1-6, and that you choose to configure your PCMCIA drivers according to the options in the kernel source tree rather than in the currently running kernel.
  3. Run "make" to compile the modules.
  4. Run "make install" to install the modules.
  5. Reboot. Your kernel and PCMCIA drivers should be fully configured to use the WaveLAN network now (with the exception of DHCP -- see the SPINACH pages below).

If the hardware is set up successfully...

You now have to get a DHCP address, get authenticated and get online. These are four simple steps that are explained on the SPINACH Usage page.
 
Click here to get online!


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