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May 25, 2005
802.11a Configuration Woes ... with Solution
Today, I tried to bring up the 802.11a connection here at Guru Labs. It failed. Although my previous configuration had been working, something had changed and the configuration "trick" I had come up with was not robust enough to deal with it.
After playing around with the configuration, I was able to get it working by commenting out the CHANNEL variable in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1-work file. Then, using iwpriv as I had previously I would bring up the interface, associate with the 802.11a access point (AP) and configure the interface using DHCP.
The search was on for a better way to configure the system to prefer 802.11a over either 'b' or 'g' in the ifcfg-eth1-work file.
The solution was really quite simple; add this line to the appropriate ifcfg-* configuration file(s) in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ directory:
IWPRIV="set_mode 7"
In the case of my Intel IPW2915 wireless Mini-PCI NIC, this value places the card in "802.11abg" mode, which tries to find an 802.11a connection before trying 802.11g and, finally, 802.11b. Other NICs may not use the same parameters, but whatever it is that needs to be passed to the IWPRIV command can be placed in that variable and it will be used before trying to associate to an AP.
In my case, the access point had been reboot and, apparently, had decided to use a different channel, which is why my first stab at persistently configuring 802.11a support failed.
Thanks go to Dax for pointing out that the ifup-wireless script could utilize the IWPRIV variable in the ifcfg-* files.
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Lamont R. Peterson
Posted by lamontp at May 25, 2005 4:01 PM
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