Can't Connect CentOS5 Wireless

[Ascendancy]

I have just done a clean install of CentOS5 on an old PC desktop I had. It's got a Dynex Enhanced Wireless G Desktop Card in it which I believe the system is recognizing as eth1, but I just don't see where to enter my SSID or WEP key to connect. I have gone through the Admin->Network menu's a few different times, tried restarting the machine and making changes to things but still nothing.

I'm a complete newbie to Linux, so any help would be greatly appreciated

[reed9]

It's possible CentOS doesn't come with a graphical wireless tool, being a server and enterprise oriented distro. (By the way, unless you have a pressing reason to use it, I really recommend using a more desktop oriented distro as a beginner, such as Ubuntu or Fedora.)

Anyway, I would install WICD to handle your connections.

You can also set it up via the command line. (CentOS may not use "sudo", in which case you would login to root with su -, and it may not use dhclient, but dhcpd instead.

[Dapper Dan]

I have just done a clean install of CentOS5 on an old PC desktop I had. It's got a Dynex Enhanced Wireless G Desktop Card in it which I believe the system is recognizing as eth1, but I just don't see where to enter my SSID or WEP key to connect. I have gone through the Admin->Network menu's a few different times, tried restarting the machine and making changes to things but still nothing.

I'm a complete newbie to Linux, so any help would be greatly appreciated

When I was using CentOS I can remember having similar issues with wireless devices seen as wired, thus giving no option to configure from the network configuration utility. If CentOS is "seeing" the card, perhaps you can get it configured from the command line. Normally wireless cards are "seen" as wlan0 but if you have no Ethernet card, that might explain why your wireless is being seen as eth0. Open a terminal and do:

su -

Press enter and input password. As "su" do these commands and please post the results of the first two if you can...

/sbin/ifconfig eth0

/sbin/iwconfig

and:

/sbin/iwlist eth0 scan

No need to post the results of the last one but let us know if eth0 is detecting access points. If it finds none, do:

/sbin/lsmod

and tell me if you see a module in there that begins with "bcm."

[Dapper Dan]

(By the way, unless you have a pressing reason to use it, I really recommend using a more desktop oriented distro as a beginner, such as Ubuntu or Fedora.)

I agree. As a new user CentOS can be a pretty tough distro.

[Ascendancy]

Yeah I have Ubuntu running on my laptop, I am just interested in working on a server distro as well because they're both 2 different environments. Here's my results from the terminal:

[root@localhost ~]# su -
[root@localhost ~]# /sbin/ifconfig etho0
etho0: error fetching interface information: Device not found
[root@localhost ~]# /sbin/ifconfig eth1
eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:22:75:1A:4D:17  
          BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
          Interrupt:11 Base address:0x4000 

[root@localhost ~]# /sbin/iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

eth1      IEEE 802.11b/g  ESSID:""  Nickname:"localhost.localdomain"
          Mode:Master  Frequency=2.412 GHz  Access Point: Invalid   
          RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Link Quality=0/100  Signal level=-256 dBm  Noise level=-256 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

sit0      no wireless extensions.

[root@localhost ~]# /sbin/iwlist eth0 scan
eth0      Interface doesn't support scanning.

I tried the last piece of code you put in, but no module was shown with "bcm". I don't fully understand a lot of this, but it seems like it's not even recognizing a wireless device?

[reed9]

bcm would indicate it's a broadcom chipset, which historically has been very troublesome under linux. Broadcom released a linux driver for many of their cards, which some distros have started to include, (though it isn't open source, so many will not). bcm would also indicate it's the old deprecated open source driver, the new one being b43, but CentOS uses an old kernel and may still have the bcm43xx drivers.

Can you post the output of /sbin/lspci and /sbin/lsmod?

[Dapper Dan]

The command was for eth0 instead of etho0 but no matter... it appears CentOS is finding your wireless device as eth1. Do:

/sbin/iwlist eth1 scan

If you see access points then you might be able to get it going with:

/sbin/iwconfig eth1 essid name_of_access_point_you_want_to_connect_to

Then:

/sbin/dhclient eth1

If no errors...

/sbin/ifconfig eth1 up

[Ascendancy]

Well I got something called the NetworkManager up and running in the top right corner of the screen, tried adding my network name and WEP key but my signal strength is 0. I used to have XP installed on this with the same wireless card and it picked up the signal 75-100% strength, so I know it can't be that I'm too far away from the access point.

After running

/sbin/iwlist eth1 scan

I get the following output:

eth1          Interface doesn't support scaning : No such device

I tried your second suggestion of trying to manually add it and start it, but the terminal kept looping with something about send_packet: Network is down (I'd copy the whole thing to you, but I don't really have a way to get it off my desktop as it can't get online )

So I think it's working because my NetworkManager is running and I have the "use Wireless" box checked, it's just not picking up a wireless signal for some reason?

EDIT:
I don't know if this helps at all but I'm currently posting this from the exact same room as my desktop on my laptop running Ubuntu, so I'm sure the wireless signal can be reached from here.

[reed9]

I think we should start from the beginning and determine the exact chipset of the card, that the correct driver is being used, etc.

Read the Wireless Setup page and post all the requested info, please.

[Ascendancy]

Ran through the BASH script, here's the results:

============== lspci ============
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE/PE DRAM Controller/Host-Hub Interface (rev 01)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 01)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 01)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 01)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 01)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 01)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 81)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL (ICH4/ICH4-L) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 01)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801DB (ICH4) IDE Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) SMBus Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)
01:04.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)
01:05.0 Modem: Intel Corporation FA82537EP 56K V.92 Data/Fax Modem PCI (rev 04)
01:09.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401 100Base-T (rev 01)

============== lsusb ============
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000  
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000  
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000  
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000  

============== lsmod ============
Module                  Size  Used by
i915                   23745  2 
drm                    65493  3 i915
autofs4                24517  2 
hidp                   23105  2 
rfcomm                 42457  0 
l2cap                  29505  10 hidp,rfcomm
bluetooth              53797  5 hidp,rfcomm,l2cap
sunrpc                144893  1 
ip_conntrack_ftp       11697  0 
ip_conntrack_netbios_ns     6977  0 
ipt_REJECT              9537  1 
xt_state                6209  11 
ip_conntrack           53025  3 ip_conntrack_ftp,ip_conntrack_netbios_ns,xt_state
nfnetlink              10713  1 ip_conntrack
iptable_filter          7105  1 
ip_tables              17029  1 iptable_filter
ip6t_REJECT             9409  1 
xt_tcpudp               7105  28 
ip6table_filter         6849  1 
ip6_tables             18053  1 ip6table_filter
x_tables               17349  6 ipt_REJECT,xt_state,ip_tables,ip6t_REJECT,xt_tcpudp,ip6_tables
dm_multipath           22089  0 
video                  21193  0 
sbs                    18533  0 
backlight              10049  1 video
i2c_ec                  9025  1 sbs
button                 10705  0 
battery                13637  0 
asus_acpi              19289  0 
ac                      9157  0 
ipv6                  258273  15 ip6t_REJECT
xfrm_nalgo             13765  1 ipv6
crypto_api             11969  1 xfrm_nalgo
lp                     15849  0 
floppy                 57125  0 
snd_intel8x0           35421  1 
snd_ac97_codec         93025  1 snd_intel8x0
ac97_bus                6337  1 snd_ac97_codec
snd_seq_dummy           7877  0 
snd_seq_oss            32577  0 
snd_seq_midi_event     11073  1 snd_seq_oss
snd_seq                49585  5 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi_event
snd_seq_device         11725  3 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq
snd_pcm_oss            42945  0 
snd_mixer_oss          19009  1 snd_pcm_oss
snd_pcm                72005  3 snd_intel8x0,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm_oss
snd_timer              24517  2 snd_seq,snd_pcm
bcm43xx               415713  0 
snd                    52421  11 snd_intel8x0,snd_ac97_codec,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq,snd_seq_device,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_timer
i2c_i810                9285  0 
ide_cd                 40033  0 
i2c_algo_bit           12489  1 i2c_i810
ieee80211softmac       33473  1 bcm43xx
cdrom                  36705  1 ide_cd
soundcore              11553  1 snd
parport_pc             29157  1 
i2c_i801               11597  0 
b44                    29005  0 
ieee80211              33289  2 bcm43xx,ieee80211softmac
snd_page_alloc         14281  2 snd_intel8x0,snd_pcm
parport                37513  2 lp,parport_pc
i2c_core               23745  3 i2c_ec,i2c_algo_bit,i2c_i801
serio_raw              10693  0 
pcspkr                  7105  0 
mii                     9409  1 b44
ieee80211_crypt        10049  1 ieee80211
dm_snapshot            21477  0 
dm_zero                 6209  0 
dm_mirror              29125  0 
dm_mod                 61405  9 dm_multipath,dm_snapshot,dm_zero,dm_mirror
ata_piix               22341  0 
libata                143997  1 ata_piix
sd_mod                 24897  0 
scsi_mod              134605  2 libata,sd_mod
ext3                  123593  2 
jbd                    56553  1 ext3
uhci_hcd               25421  0 
ohci_hcd               23261  0 
ehci_hcd               33357  0 

============== dmesg-firmware ===========

============== kernel version ===========
2.6.18-92.el5