[CentOS] CentOS 5 and Broadcom wireless

[Bart Schaefer]

On 5/12/07, Bart Schaefer <barton.schaefer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> So evidently I need to install ndiswrapper.

OK, I'm really really close now ...

- Installed dkms, dkms-ndiswrapper, dkms-fuse, fuse, and fuse-ntfs-3g
from RPMforge.  (Thanks again, Dag.)
- Mounted my Windows drive with ntfs-3g.
- Located bcmwl5a.inf and installed it with ndiswrapper -i.
- Changed the modprobe.conf alias for eth1 from bcm43xx to ndiswrapper.
- Edited /etc/sysconfig/wpa_supplicant and set the interface to eth1
and the driver to ndiswrapper.
- Copied the appropriate configuration from the examples in
/usr/share/doc/ into /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf and
edited the ssid, key and auth_alg.
- Shut down NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatcher because they
were still trying to access the device with the bcm43xx driver.
- Unloaded all the modules related to bcm43xx with "rmmod".
- Loaded the ndiswrapper module with "modprobe".
- Restarted the wpa_supplicant service.

And lo!  eth0 (wired net) has been deactivated, and eth1 is up,
connected to the AP, and has obtained the expected IP address (I
entered the MAC addr into the router to force DHCP to return a
specific address for this NIC).  All wonderful so far ...

However, I can't ping any other IP address on the network (not even
the AP itself); everything says "destination unreachable".  There's no
default route, and attempting to add one induces the DNS-related sytem
crawl I've been discussing on another thread (only while the route is
being added, it clears up once the route is there).

Further, /etc/sysconfig/hwconf still says the driver for eth1 is
bcm43xx.  I edited that manually to change it to ndiswrapper, but upon
reboot it got reset back to bcm43xx.  I have to manually rmmod bcm43xx
and modprobe ndiswrapper before I can connect to the AP again.

So what's next?  How do I stop kudzu (if that's what is doing it) from
forcing the driver back to bcm43xx?  Should I just leave
NetworkManager off, or will it start doing the right thing once hwconf
is fixed?  Do I need to manually configure the default route?

And, looking ahead, what would I need to change to be able to have
both the wired and wireless networks active at the same time?