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Upgrade from sarge to etch and hotplug in network interfaces February 10, 2007

Posted by maxmil in : Debian, Networking , 1 comment so far

Having upgraded from sarge to etch my network interfaces were no longer brought up with the system boot. This was because my kernel has been upgraded from 2.4 to 2.6. I don’t know too much about this but 2.4 uses hotplug where as 2.6 uses udev and in my etc/network/interfaces my interfaces were configured to be brought up by hotplug using the mapping stanza.

The solution was to add the interfaces that i want to come up at boot to the auto line. I’ve also added a new line allow-hotplug which automatically brings up my wireless interface when i plug in my pcmi wireless network card. This is what my /etc/network/interfaces now looks like.

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo wlan0
allow-hotplug wlan0

# The loopback interface
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
iface eth0 inet dhcp

# The wireless interface
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wireless-essid WLAN_78
wireless-mode Managed
wireless-keymode restricted
wireless-key1 s:XXXXXXXXXX

Updating kernel and ndiswrapper June 3, 2006

Posted by maxmil in : Debian, Networking , 4 comments

I updated my kernel on Debian Sarge from 2.4.27 to 2.6.8-3. The first problem that i found was that my wireless interface wlan0 was no longer present.

When i issued the command ndiswrapper -l it told me that both my hardware and the driver were present. The problem was that the ndiswrapper module was not being loaded in my new kernel.

The solution to this was easy thanks to apt.

apt-get install ndiswrapper-modules-2.6.8-3-386

I also installed all the dependent packages (ndiswrapper-utils)

And then load the module

modprobe ndiswrapper

Now everything works as before

ifscheme – configuring multiple wireless interfaces on debian sarge May 25, 2006

Posted by maxmil in : Debian, Networking , 1 comment so far

I was having the annoying problem that my wlan0 configuration in /etc/network/interfaces was different at home and at work. This is quite normal really, the essid and the key are expected to be different. The problem was that every time i changed location i had to redit my /etc/network/interfaces file and ifdown wlano, ifup wlan0 in order to connect to the new network.

I now have a solution: ifscheme

I configured it with apt. The versión that i got at the time of writing was 1.3-3.

How to use it 

/etc/network/interfaces

First add a mapping to allow ifscheme to control the interfaces

# Wireless interfaces controlled by ifscheme
mapping wlan0
        script ifscheme-mapping

Then define the interfaces as…

# Home wireless inteface
iface wlan0-home inet dhcp
        wireless-essid ESSIDID
        wireless-mode Managed
        wireless-keymode open
        wireless-key1 xxxx-xxx…
        wireless-defaultkey 1
        name Home wireless 

 # Work wireless inteface
iface wlan0-home inet dhcp
        wireless-essid WORKESSIDID
        wireless-mode Managed
        wireless-keymode open
        wireless-key1 xxxx-xxx…
        wireless-defaultkey 1
        name Home wireless

Thats it! 

Wireless Configuration April 22, 2006

Posted by maxmil in : Debian, Networking , add a comment

ifup and ifdown

Brings up and down interfaces defined in /etc/network/interfaces. ex: ifup wlan0 for wireless network interface.

iwlist

Gives you more info about your wireless interface. Most useful so far is iwlist wlan0 scan which shows information about all networks in range.

iwconfig

Allows dynamic configuration of wireless interface. For example to connect to unprotected network “MY_ESSID”:

iwconfig wlan0 essid “MY_ESSID”
iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed
iwconfig wlan0 key off

Note: to set permenantly for startup add to /etc/network/interfaces

ifconfig

Posted by maxmil in : Debian, Networking , add a comment

Similar to ipconfig in windows

traceroute

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Traces the route (like tracert on windows) from where you are to the domain you specify. ex: traceroute google.com

nslookup

Posted by maxmil in : Debian, Networking , add a comment

Looks up ip of a domain. ex: nslookup google.co.

Can also be used to do reverse dns lookups by providing an ip instead of a domain name.

ex: nslookup 216.239.57.104

*However this seems to rarely give results.