After getting airport extreme working on linux (see ibook + linux == wlan!) I thought everything was good and I was ready to move to linux fulltime (on my laptop that is, my workstation has been running linux fulltime a number of years now). But the next time I booted I was unable to get the wireless network to function. When I ran dhclient I wasn’t given an ip address, just this error message.
receive_packet failed on eth1: Network is down
The only thing I noticed was that even though I explicitly set the rate to 11M, it was set to 54M after running dhclient. So it seemed like dhclient was doing something funny. But I was unable to pinpoint the exact problem and left it be for the time.
Today I found a solution in this thread. It’s not a permanent solution, rather some kind of a hack, but it works.
First bring up the interface.
# ifconfig eth1 up
Next, and this is the key, associate the interface at the same time as dhclient is DHCPDISCOVERing. Run this command in one terminal.
# dhclient eth1
When you get output similar to this
DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7
you run this command in another terminal.
# iwconfig eth1 channel 11 rate 11M essid "Erik" enc <secret password>
Of course you’ll have to replace “Erik” etc with your settings.
And, once again, I’m able to say: the wireless network card (AirPort Extreme) is now working.
Hello Erik!
I’m using the latest Kubuntu, with the latest updated kernel, but I’m unable to get working my airport card. I have WEP on my access point, with of course my ibook g4.
My eth1 wireless is up, but with DHCP i have got no luck.
Are you using the same distributions? Have you some others hints/suggestions?
Thank you!
I’m a Debian user, so unfortunately I can’t help you with Kubuntu issues. But you might find something of interest here: http://bcm43xx.spugna.org/
i also found this problem , but after i update dhclient to 3.0.5, all is ok now.you can download dhclient from http://www.isc.org