[ILUG] Strange problem with WiFi cards

[Timothy Murphy]

I have two identical WiFi cards (Orinoco Gold PCMCIA cards).
I use one in my laptop all the time, and it works perfectly.
I thought I would try the other this evening,
but for some reason it would not connect to my desktop.

I tried both under Windows-2000, using putty,
and both worked equally well.

It is as though Linux somehow takes my usual card as default,
though I don't find anything anywhere to specify that.

I'm using dhcp, and have even specified the MAC address of the second card
in /etc/dhcpd.conf on the desktop,
but this seems to have no effect.

I'm running Fedora-3 with kernel-2.6.11,
but I tried the official Fedora kernel,
and that was exactly the same.

I notice I get a DHCPREQUEST on my desktop from Windows
with the second card, but not from Linux:
=====================================
Mar 26 03:53:18 alfred dhcpd: DHCPDISCOVER from 00:02:2d:1d:43:b7 via eth2
Mar 26 03:53:18 alfred dhcpd: DHCPOFFER on 192.168.3.5 to 00:02:2d:1d:43:b7 
via eth2
Mar 26 03:53:18 alfred dhcpd: DHCPREQUEST for 192.168.3.5 (192.168.3.1) from 
00:02:2d:1d:43:b7 via eth2
Mar 26 03:53:18 alfred dhcpd: DHCPACK on 192.168.3.5 to 00:02:2d:1d:43:b7 via 
eth2
=====================================

I'm disappointed that WiFi seems so much more difficult to configure
under Linux than under Windows.

I'll be grateful of any light anyone can throw on this problem.


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland