Wireless yes, Internet no

[blwilk]

I wonder if anyone out there has had this problem. I am running a Toshiba Satellite Pro with a built in Atheros AR500 mini wireless card. I was able to connect to my WI-FI LAN and the internet running Knoppix 4.3.8. I decided to try some of the later versions (version 5.x.x and up) and I get the following result. I can connect to my LAN just fine. I can bring up the setup page for my router and I can also get the status page for my network printer on my browser. The only problem is that I cannot connect to the internet. LAN yes WAN no. Any suggestions?

[Harry Kuhman]

...... I can bring up the setup page for my router and I can also get the status page for my network printer on my browser. The only problem is that I cannot connect to the internet. LAN yes WAN no. Any suggestions?

Wow, quite different from the majority of Knoppix users fighting with wireless connections. I myself have not been able to get any version of Knoppix after 4.02 to connect wirelessly. But if you can get to the wireless setup page, you should be in good shape.

Since you obviously are not, I'll first start with the obvious questions: What make and model of router is it? Do you have any "security features" in the router enabled that we should know about, most importantly any MAC address filtering? What does your output from ifcoinfig look like? Who is your ISP, and could this be an IP4/IP6 issue?

And another question that may sound condescending but is quite sincere, why do you think that you don't have Internet access? Please open a shell (command prompt) and type the command ping 89.145.97.110 and report back what happens. If it works (which would indicate that you do indeed have Internet access), type ping knoppix.net and tell us what happens. If it fails but the prior ping worked, then you have a DNS issue.

[blwilk]

My bad. Some of the information I posted was not correct. The version of Knoppix that I used to connect successfully was 3.8 not 4.3.8. Also, the computer suffered a hard drive failure and, when the hard drive was replaced and the OS installed, (Windows XP Professional) the Atheros card would not work for Windows. The Atheros card still works for Knoppix 3.8. I am using them both for this post. However, to get my Windows OS to work, I used a Netgear 802.11b PCMCIA card Model MA401. That let my Windows OS work with my wireless network. The problems that I had with the versions 5.x of Knoppix were with the Netgear card. The Atheros card does not let me even talk to the LAN. I don't get a timeout message or a not connected message. What happens with the Atheros card is the browser says that it is done and I get a blank screen.
Now that I have cleared that up, back to the original problem. With the Netgear card I can bring up the setup page for the router which is a Belkin 4 port router with 802.11b wireless capability. I really can't give the model number because it is really hard to get to where the router is located and the setup page only lists the serial number. I tried pinging the IP address that you gave and got a message that the connection could not be reached. It appears that my later versions of Knoppix cannot get out of the house. Here is a couple of other pieces of information. When I bring up the setup page, it says that the inernet connection is ok and Knoppix 3.8 also works fine with the Netgear card.

[Harry Kuhman]

OK, it's a bit confusing, but let me state my understanding of the current situation (just in case part of it is incorrect) and then I'll get into the dialog: You have a computer, very likely a notebook, that you run XP pro on and are also trying to boot knoppix on. I sure hope we are not talking about "installed" Knoppix, because in my experience here networking will more likely fail than work on "installed Knoppix". You have an Atheros card card, whatever that is, and it "works" with Knoppix 3.8. I'm not at all clear what works means, can you get to the Internet with it, or just to the router? It apparently isn't working with XP. You have a Netgear 802.11b PCMCIA card Model MA401 and that works with XP and as I understand it you can connect with Knoppix 3.8 to the router with it but you can't get past the router and to the Internet. Although you can get to the routher home page, you can't ping this site by either IP address or URL. Is all of that correct?

OK, so here's my current thoughts:

I still would want to know what your ifconfig is reporting. You seem to have ignored this request, but I don't think anyone is going to be able to tell you much based on little more than "this configuration should work" without good information.

You also didn't respond to the question about features like MAC addressing being enabled in the router. We are likely going to have to know how this router is configured to help resolve this.

It's curious that you say that it's a Belkin 802.11b wireless router. I also had a Belkin 802.11b router and I also had problems with Knoppix with it. But my problems were different than yours. In my case the router would not do the DHCP handshake properly with Knoppix and I had to manually reset the network connection and do a manual netcardconfig every time i want to use it. I can't give you the exact model number either, since I no longer have the router. Since you are reporting that you can get to the router home page through Knoppix I don't think we have the same problem and likely not the same router.

Lets back up a step, boot into Knoppix again, confirm that you can reach the the router home page, and then try to ping the router's address. That should certainly work, as you already proved that you can talk to the router. But it just makes sense to see some ping work and then some ping fail (try pinging this site by IP again), since we are trying to determine exactly where the failure is.

You're still withholding who your ISP is, which might be important in trying to figure out if it's a IPV4/IPv6 issue. Heck we don't even know what type of a system you are connecting to, DSL, cable or something else. Should it matter? No. But then again, it should be working and that it isn't kind of implies that we need all of the data that we can get.

My next though would be to try three simple things: 1) Power down the router, wait a few seconds, and power it up again. See if you can connect to the Internet through it now. 2) If the answer to 1 is NO, then try resetting the router. In both test 1 and 2 I suggest connecting immediately with Knoppix, don't connect with Windows first. We have seen a lot of time wasted fighting router problems when a simple power cycle or router reset corrected everything. and 3) is to check the Belkin website and see if there is a firmware update for your particular make and model of router (there never was for my Belkin router, but they changed the 802.11b hardware and the newer router had several updates available). If there is a newer version of the router firmware available, flash it.

If none of this works and you are still at the point where you can connect to the Belkin router's setup page through the Netgear 802.11b PCMCIA card Model MA401 in Knoppix but can't get to the outside world, I would suggest trying to hook up the computer to the router with a wired eithernet connection and seeing if this problem is limited to the wifi connection or if it's true no matter how you connect to the router. Of course, I don't know if your computer even has a wired ethernet port, but once again I come back to the lack of posted information that is slowing down the diagnosis of this issue.

[blwilk]

Very sorry about my oversight and thank you for your patience. My ISP is ATT and was formerly SBC. The connection is DSL running PPPoE which is handled by the router. I am running the various versions of Knoppix from CD. They are not installed. The computer is a laptop. The Atheros card is internal to the laptop and is part of the built in wireless. It is ironic that the built in wireless now refuses to connect with the native OS (Windows XP).
As for what works and doesn't work. Knoppix 3.8 works using either the Atheros card or the Netgear card. By works I mean that I can connect to the network and access the internet. The problems that I am having are with the Knoppix versions 5.x (I have tried two versions). As for the tests that you requested, I am sending this post from work and will not be able to do anything until I get home later. I did, however, recycle the power to the router because, when I looked at the DHCP client list, there were two addresses for Knoppix. I think this happened because I was accessing the router with two different versions of Knoppix. At any rate, after recycling the power, there was only one address but the problem with the 5.x versions was still there. Local access was ok. I was able to read the client list with this setup. Internet access was ng.
For what it is worth, I use the command line to set up my connection. For version 3.8, I input the essid, channel and encryption (WEP) using iwconfig. Then I issue a pump -i eth0 command to connect. For the 5.x versions I follow the same procedure except I have to issue an ifconfig eth0 up command after the pump command to connect. The Netgear card is eth0 and when I use the Atheros card it is ath0.
As for the router settings, I did not turn on MAC cloning and I have several other computers on the network running both Windows XP and 98 that access the internet. All of these computers were off when I was trying to get on line with Knoppix.
By the way, I did ping the router and got a response.

[dram]

Sounds like a dns issue, if you can ping external sites but cannot view any urls. Have you tried putting your isp's primary and backup dns servers directly into the router's setup page, and restart networking, or just reboot?, I'd try to find the real dns addresses or your isp, and not rely so much on what the typical windows-centric soho router may offer.

[Harry Kuhman]

OK, I'm getting a much better understanding of the issues now. It certainly does seem that this is some 5.x version issue since 3.8 works and 5.x does not. However, I have never managed to get any 5.x to work on wireless at all, even to see the router configuration page, so if there is something that is different with 5.x I may not have seen it (4.02 worked for me fine, although only with one wifi card of several that I have, even though Puppy and Mandriva1 would recognize several of the other cards).

I am still puzzled that you can get to the router but not then the outside world. This is usually a DNS issue, but if you can't ping this site by IP address then it's not a DNS issue. (Or at least it's not only a DNS issue.) I still think that it's important to be sure that no MAC address or other filtering is going on in the router. Yea, a reasonable person would say that I'm nuts, that the NIC has the same MAC address no matter if it's Windows or Linux using it, but we have seen reports of a MAC address filter that was for unknown reasons seeing a different MAC address with Knoppix that Windows (and no, the user didn't deliberately change it under Knoppix). So since it sounds very much like a filtering issue and I don't have other stuff like the ifconfig data, my mind keeps coming back here. It would also help a lot to know how things behave when the notebook is connected to the router with a hunk of CAT5. If the problem still persists with a wired connection, then I feel certain that we can resolve it one way or another. If it is a wifi only problem then it should be easy to resolve also, and the problem area will be much more constrained, but my own bad experiences with Knoppix 5.x and wifi will make it harder for me to be the one to help further zero in on the problem.

[blwilk]

I'm home now and the results are interesting and confusing.
Here is the ifconfig results for version 3.8 which works completely.

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:09:5B:28:23:B1
inet addr:192.168.2.57 Bcast:255.255.255.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::209:5bff:fe28:23b1/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:45 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:49 errors:2 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:24886 (24.3 KiB) TX bytes:11005 (10.7 KiB)
Interrupt:3 Base address:0x100

And now I give you the ifconfig results for version 5.1 which talks to the router and other devices on the LAN but not the internet.

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:09:5B:28:23:B1
inet addr:192.168.2.57 Bcast:255.255.255.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::209:5bff:fe28:23b1/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:227 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:319 errors:3 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:87400 (85.3 KiB) TX bytes:58152 (56.7 KiB)
Interrupt:3 Base address:0xd100

Finally the hard wire connection results. Could not even talk to the router. Could not get an address by DHCP. Apparently Knoppix does not like the ethernet card. Which is an Intel Pro/100 VE Network Connection.

[Harry Kuhman]

....results are interesting and confusing......

Yea, interesting and confusing. But here's what I think I see: The data for the working 3.8 and the only partly working 5.x seems to be the same. That "inet6 addr: fe80::209:5bff:fe28:23b1/64 Scope:Link " line seems to be telling me that somehow Knoppix thinks it has IPv6 capability. I have never seen (or at least never noticed) this line on my systems when in Knoppix, but I'm pretty sure neither my router or my DSL modem have IPv6 support. So I'm thinking that your system is trying to talk IPv6 but something is going wrong. I'm rather surprised to the this line at all in Knoppix 3.8 (so much so that I'm wondering if I'm interpreting it wrong), but I'm going to blindly go on with the assumption that it is ipv6 related.

So maybe what we are seeing is that something is trying to talk ipv6 but failing when it gets past the router. SInce I don't have IPv6 and have never worked with it, I'm very limited in what I can say about it. But I certainly expect that there should be some way to disable it in Knoppix. A quick Google search on disabling IPv6 in Linux gives me a lot of links, but the few that I looked at talk about editing files and then robooting the system, not a very effective fix when dealing with a Live CD. Still, I suspect that rebooting all of Linux may not be needed, and hope that you might be able to edit a configuration and then just restart networking. I'll leave it to you to do further searching in this area.

It would be very nice if there were some Knoppix "cheat code" that disabled IPv6 at boot time, such as knoppix ipv6=off . But I don't know of one. Still, sometimes people end up posting that they have come across working cheat codes that never made it to the documentation file.

I'm thinking that there may be some IPv6 difference between 3.8 and your newer version that is the issue.

Another thought that I had was that we are assuming that any ping beyond the router is failing. But it might just be that ping to the other side of the world that is failing. Having done the ping test, you might want to try a traceroute. The traceroute to the router should be simple and clean. I expect that the traceroute to this website's IP address will not get past the router, but any information that does come back from any hop beyond the router would be extremely telling.

Too bad about the wired connection issue, that would have told us a lot (and I still am not 100% convinced that it's not a wifi issue, although I can't come up with any good theories on how it could be). On that issue, you say that you are using Knoppix 5.1. Does this mean 5.1.0? Have you tried the newer 5.1.1? And have you tried the much newer 5.3.1 (officially available only in DVD format)? I don't know if that NIC is supported in either newer version (don't know for sure that it's not supported in your version either), but it would be a big help if you could use the wired NIC and rule out all wifi issues.

One final thought would be that since you have both a working Knoppix system and a failing Knoppix system, there has to be something different about the packets of the two systems, particularly since both are known to get as far as the router. You can actually examine the packet by capturing it with ethereal (included in Knoppix). This product is now being called Wireshark on the Internet if you need more information, but I think the version on both of the discs that you have still use the ethereal name. And since a ping is failing, you can use a very small and simple packet to make a comparison: Under 3.8, run ethereal and configure it to capture packets from your wifi card. Do a few pings to this site and get the packets and responses. You should be able to pick out each ping packet and the response packets. Save your captured packets for comparison. Then boot a failing version of Knoppix. Do the same ethereal startup and configuration and try to capture some ping traffic. You'll likely see the pings but no response packets. (If there are response packets that would be extremely telling and we would have to figure out why Knoppix doesn't think there are responses.) Once you have both sets of packets, you should be able to pick through them and hopefully find some key difference between what is being sent out by 3.8 and by 5.x.

Good luck, and plase keep us posted on what you learn.

[blwilk]

Here is a little more info. The three versions of Knoppix that I am running are as follows:

3.8.2 which works with both wireless and wired connections

5.0.1 which does not work although I can bring up the setup screen with a wireless connection. It does sort of work with a hard wire connection in that I can ping sites by name so the DNS appears to be working but I cannot load data into the browser. I get a very long wait or the browser says it's done but the screen is blank. I can't even load the setup screen that I can get with a wireless connection. I believe that this may be a router problem. I will try connecting through the network at work on Wednesday to see if the wired connection works properly there.

5.1.1 which behaves the same as 5.0.1 with the wireless connection but will not work at all with the wired connection. I can't even get an address assigned.