Does anyone know what the wmaster0 interface does in terms of wireless
networking on a Dell Latitude D420 laptop?
Here is my story:
Installed Fedora 8 i386 to an external USB hard drive which the Dell can
boot from (yes, over USB.) I can almost immediately connect to my home
wifi network on the wlan0 interface. All I needed to do was go to
System-->Administration --> Network and "Edit" the wlan0 configuration:
specify my SSID, WEP key (I'm still using WEP), and channel. I think at
some point in this process I set the type to "master" instead of "auto"
but I later corrected it to "auto". The "Activate on boot" box was/is
checked. The DHCP box is checked too. Presto, I can get an IP and surf
the net wirelessly.
Then Thanksgiving came around and I stayed in a Hyatt Hotel for a few
days. Naturally I played with Fedora 8. The Hyatt chain offers wireless
internet through T-Mobile, so I went to System-->Administration -->
Network and copied the wlan0 interface to a new interface wlan0 with the
nickname wlan0tmobile. I changed the connection settings on this so they
are appropriate to T-Mobile: no security key, and the ssid is 'tmobile'.
Activating this interface worked wonderfully and I could connect and
then log on to the T-mobile network. Again, I seem to recall
accidentally specifying this as a "master" rather than "auto" connection.
I returned home from the hotel stay and couldn't connect to my home
network any longer! I deleted the "wlan0tmobile" connection in the
Network configuration gui and changed the WEP key while I was comparing
it to the key in my access point. After a few tries, the machine
connected to my access point and all was well.
Then this morning I noticed that one of my CentOS virtual machines
wasn't getting the same hostname assigned to it as before from dhcpd, so
I changed dhcpd.conf to assign a fixed hostname and IP address to that
machine. That corrected the issue for that one machine, but then when I
booted Fedora 8 on my laptop, I could no longer get any DHCPOFFERs for
wlan0 and the wmaster0 interface began showing up as a network
interface. This same laptop computer runs Windows XP, and I can get a
good IP address for it wirelessly under that, so I know the radio is
working and the software is keeping dhcpd happy.
What is 'wmaster0' and do I really need it? (I never checked
before-the-hotel/after-the-hotel ifconfig output to see if wmaster0 was
there consistently.) How can I get rid of the interface?
Thanks
Bob Cochran
Greenbelt, Maryland, USA
