Caveat on the AR5418

A couple of days ago, I posted about success with the AR5418 and the madwifi driver. That initial success was with 802.11a and 802.11g networks.

This morning, I got it working with an 802.11b network, but not with NetworkManager. NetworkManager could see the access point, but for some reason was unable to actually get an IPv4 address via DHCP. I killed the NetworkManager (/etc/init.d/NetworkManager stop), and ran dhclient ath1 by hand (as root, of course), and it had absolutely no problem picking one up. Not sure why yet, but if you're using NetworkManager and having trouble, try it by hand and see what you get.

[root@localhost Desktop]# cd /etc/init.d
[root@localhost init.d]# ./NetworkManager stop
NetworkManager デーモンを停止中:                           [  OK  ]
[root@localhost init.d]# dhclient ath1
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.6-Fedora
Copyright 2004-2007 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/sw/dhcp/
wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
Listening on LPF/ath1/00:19:7d:a:b:c
Sending on   LPF/ath1/00:19:7d:a:b:c
Sending on   Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on ath1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7
DHCPOFFER from 210.x.y.z
DHCPREQUEST on ath1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPACK from 210.x.y.z
bound to 10.0.1.3 -- renewal in 1402 seconds.

Hmm, actually, it occurs to me that I have my network at home set up with the same ESSID as the one here, just for simplicity's sake. It's possible that NetworkManager has cached some info (netmask, AP MAC addr, channel, modulation scheme, something) that doesn't match between the two. Worth looking into...