Networking troubles

Never buy D-Link, it sucks ;-) Configuring is hell and when you backup the configuration and want to restore it after a firmware upgrade, it won't work. Stupid thing. And now suddenly, linux clients can't connect to the wireless D-Link AP. Big trouble, spent few hours to find out. When I tried to connect, the init-script tells me it's connected to the AP, but can't recieve an IP from DHCP. Now I fixed the whole bitch and upgraded security from WEP to WPA.

First of all: despite of the positive comment of Rohan, ifplugd didn't work for me on the wired interface. When I plugged in the network cable, the deamon did nothing. When I manually brought up the interface, ifplugd took it down. Stopping ifplugd and bringing up the interface again worked of course. Rohan, did you have good experiences with ifplugd? Maybe my configuration of ifup/ifdown is wrong, but I don't think so. If you have some ideas, please leave a comment.

As I previously told, I gave wpa_supplicant a try today. There's no much online documentation available for it, but everything is explained very well in the example configuration file. Seems that piece of software has very much capabilities! I configured the AP to use WPA-PSK and modified my wpa_supplicant.conf to that. This is the configuration:

Don't forget, if you have an Intel Pro WLAN card (IPW 2100 or 2200) to uncomment the line ARGS_eth1="-Dipw" in your /etc/conf.d/wpa_supplicant file or modify it to the driver you use. I also commented everything out in /etc/conf.d/wireless. Don't forget this step, because /etc/init.d/net.eth1 (or your other interface) and /etc/init.d/wpa_supplicant would fight :-) After stopping all network stuff and starting wpa_supplicant, it seemed wpa_supplicant found the wlan but didn't request an IP. After a dhcpcd, everything worked just fine. Of course, first I had to find out some things, like I had to use the group-option and so on, before it worked. Now I just have to find a way to make wpa_supplicant or some other script requesting an IP when I bring up the device or when I start the service.

Conclusion: wpa_supplicant seems to be a very nice piece of software. I think its functionality or the use of it should be integrated in the gnome network configuration tool to make linux more user friendly for mobile users. I don't know why it isn't now. It's not fine for starting users to read the whole sample configuration and all that technical stuff: they just want to fill in some WEP-key or WPA-password (or eventually a username/password or so on).