Broken Wireless Connectivity

[Dave Cross]

I've been a bit stupid and now something that used to work no longer does.

My main desktop machine connects to the internet via a wireless
network. It uses a PCI wireless card that is identified by the network
configuration wizard as "Intersil Corporation Prism 2.5 Wavelan
chipset".

The wireless connection was set up under FC5 and worked for months
without any problems. I upgraded to FC6 and it continued to work
without problems.

Then last weekend I had some problems with my wireless access point
and as part of the diagnosis I removed the configured wireless
connection and re-added it. And since then it hasn't worked at all. I
mean that when I try to activate the connection from the network
configuration wizard, it fails to get a DHCP lease.

So, my current theory is that the wireless networking configuration
stuff changed in some subtle way between FC5 and FC6. But I don't know
how to track down what the problem is.

Some things that might be useful:

The connection loads the orinoco_pci module. I don't remember what it
used to use, but I don't think it was that. I'm certain that the
wireless connection used to be eth0, but now it's called wifi0.

Running 'iwconfig' shows two wireless connections called wifi0 (the
one I configured) and wlan0. This second one seems to be a "ghost"
connection as any changes I make to wifi0 also happen to wlan0. For
example if I change the ESSID on wifi0, then it is also changed on
wlan0.

The HAL hardware browser shows two interfaces on that card - once
called "WLAN Interface" with a device type of net.80211 and another
called "Networking Wireless Control Interface" with a device type of
net.80211.control. I don't know whether or not that was the case
before I screwed it all up.

I thought I knew what I was doing with wireless networking, but this
is going wrong at an altogether lower level than I'm comfortable with.
If anyone can talk me through debugging this problem then I'd be very
grateful.

Let me know if there's any more information that would be useful.

Thanks,

Dave...