Ndiswrapper, dhcp, internet headaches.

Question

I recently got a nintendo wii (!, woohoo) and it didn't immediately work with my wireless internet.  I read up on it and was told to upgrade & reset my router.  I did it, and now the wii works, and all my Windows computers work with the net perfectly as well.
Nevertheless, after this router upgrade, Arch's internet just won't work.  I use ndiswrapper with the netgear wg121 USB adapter, with the netgear wgr614v4 router.
My network's essid is "mnet", so to load my network, before the upgrade, I would just:
modprobe ndiswrapper
iwconfig wlan0 essid mnet
dhcpcd wlan0
...and that would be the end of it.
Now, however, I can't connect to anything when I do that.  It still detects the network -- i.e., when running iwconfig I can see my network, my router's mac address, etc.  dhcpcd doesn't give me a lot of helpful information as to what the problem is--It just runs and closes.  I've tried numerous variations of it, i.e., dhcpcd -G 192.168.0.1 wlan0, etc., but nothing usually works.  Here's the deal: sometimes it does!  On occasion, after running dhcpcd numerous times and playing with it for 15+ minutes, I can get it to connect to the internet, but there is no way to tell why!  It just "decides" randomly to connect occassionally, and it's not like I issued a different command -- each time it "decides" to connect, it was because I issued a command I must have done at least 10 times before.
dhclient gives a little more info--I found out that I was being set up with 192.168.0.5, every time--whether the net worked or not.  This is kind of signifigant because I actually set up my router to have my mac address always get 192.168.0.5, so it seems dhcp is actually working.
So the question is, why would the internet always work on windows, and rarely work on arch?  What could be the difference with the upgraded router?
Thanks for any ideas...

Answer 1

Okay then.  I just tried multiple ndiswrapper versions -- 1.35, 1.34 (what I've been using forever), 1.33, 1.32, 1.28, and 1.8.  None of them worked.  (BTW, I've been compiling ndiswrapper from source forever, and not using the pacman versions.  I did this before the network stopped working, too, so I didn't think this could possibly be a problem?)
I didn't expect ndiswrapper to work as good as native windows drivers!  I just found it weird that the driver would suddenly stop working in linux, and keep working in windows/wii.
I tried "ifconfig wlan0 up" and just about a billion other commands.
Now, I tried a bunch of really interesting tests:  First, I connected to a neighbor's network.  And it worked.  Second, I installed ubuntu and ndiswrapper 1.8 on that.  And it worked.  Why would it work with ubuntu consistently, and not with arch?  That seemed odd.
And now, the logs:
iwconfig - broken, working.  (I didn't add in the lo, eth0, sit0 on the second one; they weren't being picked up by iwconfig > file, so I added them in on the first one, but they were showing up when I ran the command).
iwlist wlan0 scan - broken, working.
dmesg - broken, working (I actually unmodprobe'd ndiswrapper and remodprobed it right before it started working.  It's weird tricks like that that get it to work, but it's not consistent, like I said).
ping google.com - broken (just in case it might help; I doubt it will, but that pops up after about 30 seconds when the internet's not working).
Notice how the broken/working contents for almost everything is pretty much the same.  That's why I figured it would be useless to post it!
Any ideas now, especially about how it would work on ubuntu and not arch (which is a little more fair then comparing arch to windows, I guess)?
Thanks again!
Last edited by tm8992 (2007-01-29 17:37:41)