Wireless-Tools and Networking with Linux at CCRMA

For using the wireless (guestnet) network at CCRMA please follow the instructions at CCRMA guestnet.

If you have a laptop with a wireless card the probability that you might use Linux and all the PlanetCCRMA features is very high. Many standard cards already have drivers which work on many Linux kernels. Perhaps the only issue is to let the Linux Kernel guess what kind of wireless card your laptop is using in case it has not recognized it.

The best way to find out about a wireless card is by issuing the command:


         lspci

and look for a wireless chip-set. There are several sites which document wireless network cards for Linux, utilities as well as Howto's. If you find you need more information, kindly look at the Wireless LAN resources for Linux at wireless tools.

A very popular wireless card in many laptops today is the 'Intel Pro Wireless' (IPW) which is part of most Centrino system's configurations and packages. Therefore as an example of getting your wireless card to work in a Linux laptop setup at CCRMA, the driver for an IPW card namely ipw2200 will configured.

First of all you might need to find out if the package wireless-tools is already installed in your computer. Type the following command:


         rpm -q wireless-tools

If you don't have wireless tools installed you can use yum to install them although they are part of a full Fedora Core installation:


         yum install wireless-tools

Furthermore, the ipw2200 is already compiled in many kernels but in case you need a fresher version or for some other reason ipw2200 RPMs can be found at ATrpms:

Download the ipw2200- rpm and the ipw2200-firmware- rpm.

Install both packages by issuing a rpm command like.


         rpm -Uvh  ipw2200-* ipw2200-firmware-*

Firmware for the IPW2200 is constantly updated and usually is the cause for not loading the driver modules into the kernel. Try to have the most up-to-date version.

Once you have successfully installed the above packages you can proceed configuring you wireless setup.

Do a
dmesg | grep ipw2200
to see how the kernel is detecting your IPW card.
Do
iwconfig
to see how your IPW card is bound to the hardware.
If eth1 is found to be bound as a wireless network interface, to see what networks are available type:
iwlist eth1 scan
– this will scan for all available networks.
Since the CCRMA guestnet wlan network is protected find with someone at staff or with the network administrator what is the “SSID” (access point name) and also the “WEP” key. Beware that your card must be registered in guestnet and that you must also have a CCRMA login.

Now configure your wireless card “eth1” or other as follows:


         'iwconfig eth1 essid YOURSSID


         iwconfig eth1 key xxxxxxxxxx

For a DHCP client you can type:
dhclient eth1
To see the status of your wireless setup you can type,
iwconfig
To start a network connection type:
ifup eth1
To see the network status type:
ifconfig

then do a


         ping cmn10.stanford.edu

to see how the connection is working.