I am connecting to a college network with Fedora Core 5. I have used many different flavors of Linux in the past but hardly consider myself an expert. I know enough to get by and now in my free time am trying to make the switch over to Fedora on my laptop.
The laptop is custom built by me. I don't really think the specs matter because this is not a hardware problem, but I'll give them if necessary.
I live a mile away from campus in the dorms. There is no wireless internet in the dorms, only wired. For privacy sake I will not show the IP addresses. In the dorms it goes like this:
xxx.xxx.129.xxx
255.255.0.0
xxx.xxx.128.1
DNS - xxx.xxx.128.2
We do not connect to a domain. All the provided numbers are given via DCHP after we login one time to the network via the gateways IP address. All it is is a DNS redirector because you can load any IP address of any website you want and go, but type google.com and you back to the campus login. The DNS and gateway in the dorms is different then the wireless DNS and gateway which is important to know for later. I have had no issues with Fedora and wired networking.
My problem comes when I take my laptop to campus and connect to the wireless network. After many hours of searching, posting, and banging my head, I gave up on trying to install the Intel 3245ABG wireless card in the laptop and just used ndiswrapper. As of right now, these are commands I go through to connect to the network once logged on:
modprobe ndiswrapper
iwlist scan wlan0
iwconfig wlan0 essid ESSID
iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed
dhclient wlan0
--
ifconfig eth0 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx netmask 255.255.248.0 up
route add default gw xxx.xxx.128.1
Then I manually gedit the /etc/resolv.conf to add the DNS numbers for the wireless.
I also must mention that because our network login does not support Linux, I must statically assign the IP and gateway in case you didn't already figure that out.
After these steps, everything is great and works like a charm. The problem arouses when I get back tot he dorm. As soon as I boot Fedora it hangs on MANY services starting for many minutes. Especially sendmail and sm-client. All-in-all it take a good 15 minutes to start up when going from wireless to wired and vice-versa. I googled it and found that when it stalls at those services it means that your DNS configuration is messed up. So before logging into gnome, I need to open a terminal and change the DNS numbers around in gedit. After I do that then everything works. Then when I go back to the wireless, I need to wait 15 minutes to start up then open terminal and repeat the process and commands.
To summarize:
2 different gateways. 2 Different DNS numbers. How can I change my configuration so my boot time isn't so slow and preferrably so I don't have to change DNS numbers everytime?
Hybrid Mode
