WiFi on a HP Elitebook 8570w

There once was a day that I compiled my own kernels and configured all modules manually. It's been quite a while since I've done anything like that, but I remembered some of it.

Today I installed my WiFi drivers. The HP Elitebook 8570w I own has a Centrino Advanced-N 6205 on board that is actually supported by Fedora 17.

$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Ivy Bridge DRAM Controller (rev 09)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Ivy Bridge PCI Express Root Port (rev 09)
00:14.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Panther Point USB xHCI Host Controller (rev 04)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Panther Point MEI Controller #1 (rev 04)
00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82579LM Gigabit Network Connection (rev 04)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Panther Point USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 04)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Panther Point High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Panther Point PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev c4)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Panther Point PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev c4)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Panther Point PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev c4)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Panther Point PCI Express Root Port 4 (rev c4)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Panther Point USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 04)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Panther Point LPC Controller (rev 04)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Panther Point 6 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 04)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation Panther Point SMBus Controller (rev 04)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Device 0ffc (rev a1)
01:00.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation Device 0e1b (rev a1)
24:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): JMicron Technology Corp. IEEE 1394 Host Controller (rev 30)
24:00.1 System peripheral: JMicron Technology Corp. SD/MMC Host Controller (rev 30)
24:00.2 SD Host controller: JMicron Technology Corp. Standard SD Host Controller (rev 30)
25:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Centrino Advanced-N 6205 (rev 34)

The device at the very bottom is the WiFi device we're looking for. But iwconfig shows it's not available to the system somehow:

$ iwconfig
thuisf    no wireless extensions.
 
vmnet8    no wireless extensions.
 
thuis     no wireless extensions.
 
eth0      no wireless extensions.
 
lo        no wireless extensions.
 
virbr0-nic  no wireless extensions.
 
virbr0    no wireless extensions.
 
noc       no wireless extensions.
 
vmnet1    no wireless extensions.

Continue Reading…

© GeekLabInfo WiFi on a HP Elitebook 8570w is a post from GeekLab.info. You are free to copy materials from GeekLab.info, but you are required to link back to http://www.geeklab.info

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Use your laptop as a wifi router

Last week, I was snowboarding with my family in Scheffau, Austria. In the appartment, there was one single cat-5 cable, while 5 of us wanted to use the internet. So I figured out how to build a ad-hoc wifi network with my laptop in order to share the network connection.

My configuration

On my laptop, I'm running Fedora 13 with dnsmasq installed. All other software is pretty standard. My wifi driver creates a wlan0, but other laptops may create wmaster0 interfaces etcetera.

Step 1: Enable routing

We set up IP forwarding:
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
iptables -I FORWARD -j ACCEPT
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
For a permanent situation, you may want to be a little more picky in what to forward and what not.

Step 2: Set up the wifi

First, we switch from managed mode to ad-hoc mode:
/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 mode Ad-Hoc
Then we choose a name for the new network. I chose my own name:
/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 essid "David"
I use WEP, which is pretty insecure, but is just good enough to keep neighbours from connecting by accident. (I would not use this for a network that stays up for more than an hour.):
iwconfig wlan0 key 1351351350
And we set the wifi channel to "automatically select a channel":
iwconfig wlan0 channel auto

Step 3: Configure the network

Then we must configure an IP. Since 192.168.0.0/16 and 10.0.0.0/8 are mostly used in ADSL environments, I use the third IANA assigned block: 172.16.0.0/12 (172.16.0.0-172.31.255.255):
ifconfig wlan0 172.31.1.254 up

And allow incoming DHCP/DNS requests:
iptables -I INPUT -m udp -p udp --dport 67 -j ACCEPT
iptables -I INPUT -m udp -p udp --dport 53 -j ACCEPT

Then, finally, we start dnsmasq as a DHCP/DNS server:
dnsmasq --no-daemon --domain-needed --bogus-priv --interface=wlan0 --bind-interfaces --dhcp-range=172.31.1.50,172.31.1.100,12h --dhcp-option=option:router,172.31.1.254 --dhcp-authoritative --log-queries --log-dhcp

Step 4: Have fun!

We're done. Other laptops can now connect to your network and you're forwarding their packets.

© GeekLabInfo Use your laptop as a wifi router is a post from GeekLab.info. You are free to copy materials from GeekLab.info, but you are required to link back to http://www.geeklab.info

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