Wireless interface renaming fun on Hardy…

As I mentioned in in my last post I was having problems with wireless.

As the drivers for the rt2500 chipset have been a problem in the past, I assumed it was the same issue rearing it’s ugly head again. I was wrong.

My system had a wlan0_rename interface as well as the expected ra0 interface.

$ sudo iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

wlan0_rename IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"XXXXXXXX"

Hmmmmm… looks like some udev fun! I’d come across the udev replacement for /etc/iftab after we swapped out a network card at $work[0] and the interfaces came up in an odd order. I figured it was something similar here.

$ sudo vim /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
:%s/ra0/wlan0/g
$ sudo vim /etc/network/interfaces
:%s/ra0/wlan0/g
$ sudo rmmod rt2500pci rt2x00pci rt2x00lib
$ sudo modprobe rt2500pci
$ iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"XXXXXX"

Bingo!