[clue-tech] broadcom wireless help anyone?

[Michael S. Farnsworth]

On Thursday 26 February 2009 05:56:55 pm Jeff Falgout wrote:
> I've been down the bcm43xx road a ton - $work get's Dell laptops with
> the Broadcom wireless nic.
> I've had Ubuntu working with it - I ditched the network manager
> applets and went command line.
>
> iwconfig
> iwlist
>
> are your friends here along with /var/log/messages

I've also developed more than a passing friendship with dhclient.conf and ifstatus-dhcp. I wasn't going to post any of these gory details, but Jeff inspired me with his plug for the command line.

I haven't worked with Broadcom wireless but my own experiences with my SMC card seem uncanniliy similar to Collins'. Since Ubuntu reached the 7's and SuSE the 11's, wireless on my Dell Inspiron has sucked intensely.

Knetworkmanager went from hit-and-miss to miss. Went back to Kinternet which worked about one time in ten. Tried wicd and that was a treat. I poised the mouse over my URL in Firefox, hit connect in wicd and clicked simultaneously and usually the web page would load before wicd announced it was "putting down the interface." What in the frickin name of Nonsense is that all about?

In any case and like Jeff, I went in desperation to the command line and config files.

When I ran ifstatus-dhcp wlan0, I saw that the gateway and dns servers were ok but the ip address indicated was from the last hotspot used. I tried to release it with dhclient -r wlan0 and get a new lease with dhclient -1 wlan0, but could only get... 
Can't bind to dhcp address: Address already in use
Please make sure there is no other dhcp server
running and that there's no entry for dhcp or
bootp in /etc/inetd.conf.
...in response. I finally took a shot in the dark and went into /etc/sysconfig/network/dhcp and set
DHCLIENT_RELEASE_BEFORE_QUIT="yes"
then ran ifdown and ifup and to my utter amazement it worked. And it continues to work with the wireless network coming up on its own when I boot up. No network managers needed.
[note: I also set a value in DHCLIENT_LEASE_TIME which defaults to infinite. This was recommended for laptops in the comments section of the file.]

Will likely bring a chuckle to some at this grossly amateurish attempt at hacking, but hey, I'm happy (for the moment).

msf
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