On using the UAF campus wireless LAN under linux

The UAF wireless network became available for use in Fall semester 2000. It doesn't cover the entire campus yet, but a description and coverage map are available from UAF Computing & Communications.

The library has a whole stack of Orinico/Wavelan/Lucent/whoever_owns_them_these_days silver 802.11b PCMCIA cards available for checkout. They come with a CD that supposedly has linux software on it, along with MacOS and Windows drivers. An instruction sheet is included which gives setup instructions for the latter two OSes, but not everyone's favorite, linux. This document intends to right that wrong.

1. Owning your wireless setup

1.1 PCMCIA setup

Ensure that you have all the proper PCMCIA tools installed to talk with your PCMCIA slots. Chances are, if you've got a semi-modern user type linux distribution such as redhat or mandrake that you installed on a laptop, it's already there, and you can skip this step. If not, we'll need to install the pcmcia_cs package. A good place to start is the pcmcia-cs page at sourceforge. The pcmcia-cs package is a gem in the opensource world: huge, but simple to build, use, and tweak. You'll need a kernel source tree to build these if you don't have them. Get the latest stable kernel. Hopefully it will be available from the UAF LUG kernel mirror ftp://linux0.cs.uaf.edu/pub/mirror/linux/kernel or just hit a standard kernel mirror like ftp://ftp.us.kernel.org.

1.2 Wireless Tools setup

If you've followed everything up to now, you should be able to restart the pcmcia services. I don't know what the best method of this is for your particular setup, so rebooting would work just fine. A properly setup pcmica_cs install should automagically detect any PCMCIA devices that are hot plugged at any time, but to be sure, put in your wireless card into a PCMCIA slot at boot time. Once you're logged in, try a


$ lsmod
Module                  Size  Used by
wvlan2_cs                11872   1 (autoclean)

To talk with the wireless extensions, you'll need some special tools. There are a few different flavors, but I've had luck with the (surprise!) Wireless Tools. Get the latest version (version 20 at this writing), and compile. The most interesting tool in here is iwconfig. Run


$ iwconfig wvlan0 up

1.3 Talking to the world

We're almost home. Now you just need an IP address. If you're within range of a base station (described in the coverage area on DC&C's site above), you can get a dynamically addressed IP, just run


$ dhcpcd wvlan0

Hopefully it returns instantly, and dhcpcd has set up all your networking tables correctly.

2. Go to Town, Slurping Network Traffic Like A Mad Daemon

do it. I've had speeds up to 90kb/s, and have run graphics intensive remotely and smoothly over my gheto laptop. Great!

questions/comments/threats should head to j0seph sheedy, who is responsible for all this.