Repost: DHCP failing with WiFi after 6.0 upgrade

Jesse Sheidlower jester at panix.com
Fri Dec 2 12:49:35 GMT 2005


I sent this yesterday to -questions, but in retrospect perhaps this
really is the right place; sorry for the duplication. 

I recently took my IBM ThinkPad X23, which had been running 4.11, and
did a fresh install (backup files, wipe disk, install from scratch)
to 6.0. Most things have gone smoothly, though there are still a few
things to iron out.

My biggest problem is that I can't seem to get DHCP to work with my
wireless card. I have an Orinoco Gold 802.11b card that's always worked
fine; I'm about to replace it with something else for 802.11g with a
new WAP.

There seem to be minor differences in how the card goes in; under 4.11
I would get various beeps when I plugged it in and after it associated,
but now it's silent. And I had to remember to load WEP in my kernel.
But I can seem to get things started by issuing the command

  ifconfig wi0 ssid jesterWAP wepmode on wepkey 0x[DELETED]

which does seem to successfully reach my WAP:

  # ifconfig wi0
  wi0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        inet6 fe80::202:[DELETED] prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x3
        ether 00:02:[DELETED]
        media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet autoselect (DS/2Mbps)
        status: associated
        ssid jesterWAP channel 6 bssid 00:[DELETED]
        stationname "FreeBSD WaveLAN/IEEE node"
        authmode OPEN privacy MIXED deftxkey UNDEF wepkey 1:104-bit txpowmax 100 bintval 100

I can't seem to get a DHCP lease, however:

  # dhclient wi0
  DHCPDISCOVER on wi0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 5
  DHCPDISCOVER on wi0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 13
  DHCPDISCOVER on wi0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7
  DHCPDISCOVER on wi0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 8
  DHCPDISCOVER on wi0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 13
  DHCPDISCOVER on wi0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 15
  No DHCPOFFERS received.
  No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.

(Under 4.11, I didn't get any verbose output from dhcpclient.)

I can get a DHCP lease with fxp0, my Ethernet card; also, Macs
in the house have no problem getting leases through the
WAP. (The DHCP server is in a separate router, not in the
WAP.)

Is there something that's changed under 6.0, or is there just
something I'm forgetting to do? Am I actually connected, or
does it just look that way? I do plan to get a new card, but I
want to get this working too.

Thank you.

Jesse Sheidlower


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