I've been having all kinds of trouble keeping my wlan connection up for more than a few hours, so I decided to take the advice of some on the MythTV forum and setup a wireless bridge to get my mythbox on-line and on my home network. The wireless bridge set-up went very smoothly. I only had to make a minor tweak to my access points. FWIW, I have a Buffalo WBR-G54 router/access point and Buffalo WLA2-G54 repeater/bridge.
I was using ndiswrapper v1.6 with my wlan pci card, so I followed the instructions over at the
ndiswrapper installation wiki to remove ndiswrapper. I shutdown and unplugged my mythbox. Physically removed my wlan card and restarted my machine. After I rebooted, I did a CTRL-ALT-F1 and logged in as root. I ran netcardconfig, saying NO to dhcp as I have a static IP for my mythbox. Netcardconfig brought up my eth0 and I was able to ping within my network as well as external websites, i.e. google.com. Everything is good until I reboot. When I reboot my box, eth0 does not start up. I have to manually perform an
Code:
ifup eth0
in order to connect. My network adapter is recognized at boot, but not until late.
Quote:
Dec 22 09:44:33 mythbox kernel: 8139too Fast Ethernet driver 0.9.27
Dec 22 09:44:33 mythbox kernel: PCI: Found IRQ 10 for device 0000:00:0b.0
Dec 22 09:44:33 mythbox kernel: PCI: Sharing IRQ 10 with 0000:00:08.0
Dec 22 09:44:33 mythbox kernel: eth0: RealTek RTL8139 at 0xe1dd6c00, 00:11:d8:b5:18:4e, IRQ 10
Dec 22 09:44:33 mythbox pci.agent[3769]: 8139too: loaded successfully
I figured out that mii is the module that seems to be loading my 8139too driver by looking at the output of lsmod > lsmod.log. After searching around google and here, I tried what others have done. I added a line to the end of my ~/modprobe.d/aliases
Code:
alias eth0 mii
but still no go on boot. I added
Code:
mii
to my /etc/modules and still no go. When I reboot I see an error go by that does not seem to appear in my logs. From what I can quickly read, it's one of these 3 from the mii-tool manual:
Quote:
SIOCGMIIPHY on 'eth?' failed: Invalid argument
If the interface is not running (up), kernel will refuse to
report its link state.
SIOCGMIIPHY on 'eth?' failed: Operation not permitted
Most kernels restrict access to root.
SIOCGMIIPHY on 'eth?' failed: No such device
This error is shown, if the kernel does not know about the named
device.
In the course of my research, I found someone who altered their laptop-net start up file.
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=36976#36976 Although my issue was not exactly the same, I tried it out and did a
Code:
update-rc.d laptop-net remove
, but that did not help either. I later did
Code:
invoke-rc.d laptop-net
which I presume restored it to the original state. If I'm wrong on that, I'm sure someone here will let me know.
So, it seems that I need to invoke the mii module earlier in the boot process, but I dod not know how to go about it. Can anyone help?