Wireless card problem

[marshallbanana]

I have managed to screw up my wireless setup (it was working fine until I stuffed something up yesterday). Running iwconfig gives the following in the relevant entry

eth1 radio off ESSID:"linksys"
Mode:Managed Frequency:nan kHz Access Point: Not-Associated
Bit Rate:0 kb/s Tx-Powerff
Retry limit:15 RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Power Managementff
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:19766 Missed beacon:0

I believe the problem is related to the 'radio off' but I can't figure out how to change this to radio on. Anyone know where I can do this?

I installed kwifimanager (in case the prob was with knetworkmananger) and under its file menu it has an entry 'radio disabled' that is selected but unfortunately I can't turn it off here.

[HighHo]

Re: Wireless card problem

Not sure if this will work as i havent really used wireless much myself, but you could try the following command to see if it corrects the problem.
iwconfig eth1 power on

[marshallbanana]

Re: Wireless card problem

The first try said not enough permissions so I did it again with sudo and got the following output

Error for wireless request "Set Power Management" (8B2C) :
SET failed on device eth1 ; Connection timed out.

Any other ideas?

[marshallbanana]

Re: Wireless card problem

Ok, I have a bit more info. Firstly, based on HighHo's idea, I looked in man:iwconfig and found only one mention of 'radio':

txpower
For cards supporting multiple transmit powers, sets the transmit power
in dBm. If W is the power in Watt, the power in dBm is P = 30 + 10.log(W). If the value is postfixed by mW, it will be automatically converted to dBm.
In addition, on and off enable and disable the radio, and auto and fixed enable and disable power control (if those features are available).
Examples :
iwconfig eth0 txpower 15
iwconfig eth0 txpower 30mW
iwconfig eth0 txpower auto
iwconfig eth0 txpower off

So I tried
sudo iwconfig eth1 txpower on
which appears to run without any sort of problems, but running iwconfig again reveals that no change has occoured.

So next I rebooted from the live cd, here I was able to connect to a wireless network and so I ran iwconfig again and this time got

eth1 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"linksys"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:18:39:C1:BC:8C
Bit Rate:24 Mb/s Tx-Power:15 dBm
Retry limit:15 RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Power Managementff
Link Quality=59/100 Signal level=-71 dBm Noise level=-74 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:759 Missed beacon:0

Two differences that I will point out are that 'radio off' has disappeared and that 'tx-power' went from 'off' to '15dBm' making me further suspect this is the problem.

However given that
sudo iwconfig eth1 txpower on
seems to do nothing (dito sudo iwconfig eth1 txpower 15) I was just wondering if these settings are in a text file somewhere that I can edit from txpower off to 15?

[marshallbanana]

Re: Wireless card problem

Solved it!

I just deleted the file /etc/network/interfaces which contained all of the settings for the wireless card and then restarted. Thanks for the inspiration HighHo.

[HighHo]

Re: Wireless card problem

No problems I didnt even give any good advice
Glad you resolved the issue and have got it all working.