Credit to David Gibson and Matt Johnston. I upgraded to later cards with more recent firmware and set the ESSID to 1234 instead of 'any'. I understand that the ESSID is required to be set under the IBSS Ad-hoc mode. -----Original Message----- From: Anthony Culligan [mailto:ACulligan@aidacapital.com] Sent: 02 December 2002 12:14 To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: [SLE] Wireless network problem I have installed wireless network cards on two hosts. The first works perfectly. The second not at all - although it communicates well when I dual boot the second machine under Windows98. I am using MELCO pcmcia cards. On removing and then replacing the cards, I can examine the /var/log/messages file and observe that there are differences in how the cardmgr loads the required modules. Both hosts identify the card correctly as MELCO WLI-PCM-L11. On the first host, the card 'looks like a Lucent/Agere firmware version 6.04'. On the second host (the one that does not work) I see a similar message but the version is '6.08'. This is regardless of which card I actually insert in the slot. The second host then has an additional message in the initialisation - 'IEEE standard IBSS ad-hoc mode supported' Subsequently, the second host has numerous messages stating that 'eth0: this firmware requires an ESSID in IBSS-Adhoc mode' followed by a timeout message. The wlist and wiconfig utilities work well on the first host but appear not to on the second host. I have tried setting ESSID to 'any' using YasT2 but it does not have any impact. A further difference between the two machines on hotplug is that whilst they both appear to load the same modules, the first machine does a check and then a modprobe whilst the second machine simply executes a series of insmod commands loading the modules from the /lib/modules/2.4.19-4GB//pcmcia-external/. The modules loaded are orinoco_cs, orinoco and hermes. Any ideas?