LINUX MAM

Here is some further background information and useful links:

• MAM homepage, with all the details on card registration etc.etc.
• Under redhat9 life seems to be a lot easier. My old instructions under redhat6 and redhat7 were adventurous. Also, the wireless settings under rh9 go in the ifcfg-ethX files, and not in the /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts file!!!
• Jagan Sankaranarayanan wrote an automated way to authenticate under the new (august 2003) MAM. Download the setup.sh and mam.pl scripts, make them excutable with

  	chmod +x setup.sh and mam.pl
  

  edit the mam.pl file appropriately (username/password) and set it up as a wrapper.

  Here's my ifcfg-eth1 version that works for redhat9. Change the name and entry to eth0, eth1, eth2 or whichever appropriate.

• Here's my old description of setting MAM up for linux (21-sep-2001)
  1. buy a compliant wireless (this can be tricky, since i got this Orinoco card, which worked fine with linux, but the recent ones (e.g. now in August 2003) turn out to be made by Proxim that did not release important details to make that card work under Linux.....
  2. register your card (you need the MAC address, usually on the back of the card, or find it from /var/log/messages when you insert the card and you have compliant hardware) with MAM.
  3. configure your networking for DHCP, this will be different for different distributions, but in redhat you can use netcfg on rh71 or below, and .... for rh72 .....
     If you frequently switch networks, you might also want to look at my eth_configure shell script to aid in that.
  4. add the following lines to your /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts file

     	....
     	case "$ADDRESS" in
             *,*,*,00:60:1D:*|*,*,*,00:02:2D:*)
     	    INFO="Example Teuben config for Orinoco card"
     	    ESSID="umd"                      <--- notice ESSID is case sensitive
     	    MODE="Managed"
     	    KEY="off"
     	    ;;		
     	...
     
     
     	(
     	note added June 2003: this was fine for rh73 and some others, but rh9
     	does not read the wireless.opts file anymore, but instead all parameters
     	are now encoded in their respective ifcfg-ethN files in
     	/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts
     	)
     
     

  5. insert card, it should startup a network on eth0 now. You may want to monitor with tail -f /var/log/messages in case there are problems.
     If you have problems, you may need some reconfigurations. For rh6/7 you probably need to issue ifdown eth0 first, and then reconfigure w/ iwconfig:
     iwconfig eth0 mode Managed key off essid umd
     will configure (you need the wireless-tools package, comes with e.g. rh71) your wireless. But again, these things can go into your /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts file as I now do.
     Some comments on the iwconfig commands:
     • mode Managed: the alternative is Ad-hoc, but campus uses APs (Structurenet, a.k.a. infrastructure) not peer-to-peer
     • key off: turn encryption off.... i'm not sure yet if this is really needed, but i could not get it working with encryption on?
     • essid umd: the SSID is "umd" (notice lower case, they are case sensitive), which is the wireless network name they choose for campus.
     
     Now, bring up your networking manually (don't eject and re-insert the card, that will reset the iwconfig settings you just did). Under rh7/6 you can probably use ifup eth0 ; you will probably see "Determining IP information for eth0... done." and that should be a good sign. If not, perhaps some of the settings are bad, or quite possibly, you are out of range of a radio station (AP).
  6. Now that your network is running, iwconfig gives the "status" of the link (also check /proc/net/wireless on various other info):

     % iwconfig eth0
     eth0      IEEE 802.11-DS  ESSID:"umd"  Nickname:"nemo"
               Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412GHz  Access Point: 00:40:96:38:DA:22
               Bit Rate:2Mb/s   Sensitivity:1/3
               RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
               Encryption key:off
               Power Management:off
               Link Quality:9/92  Signal level:-82 dBm  Noise level:-91 dBm  
               Rx invalid nwid:0  invalid crypt:0  invalid misc:3478
     

     This is the output from a standard RH71 configuration. If you change the driver from the xxx_cs to the new wavelan2_cs driver, you might see a shorter output (this is the one when connected to the RG-1000 at home):

     eth0      ORiNOCO  ESSID:"xxxxxx"  Nickname:"nemo"
               Mode:Managed  Channel:0  Sensitivity:1/3  
               RTS thr:off   
               Link Quality:17/92  Signal level:-76 dBm  Noise level:-93 dBm
               Rx invalid nwid:0  invalid crypt:0  invalid misc:5005
     

  7. I then downloaded some files, and got around 220-240 kB/s, which is around 20-30% of the peak speed (not sure it that Bit Rate of 2Mb/s is meaningful, since my speed is well over 2Mbit)
  8. signal strength software :
     • wmwave , nice little display that peeks into /proc/net/wireless
• Some of my links to wireless networking

  ---

• If you forget to register, and have a card of which the hardware address is not known, you will be on a 10.*.*.* network, and all http traffic will be routed to http://register.net.umd.edu/Register.