General wireless questions

On Sat, 17 Jan 2004, Entelin wrote:

> I have gotten my wireless card working fine with the orinoco_cs driver,
> and gotten it to connect to my linksys AP.
>
> However strangely I cant change the channel on the card, its always at
> 10, if I try with 'iwconfig eth1 channel 1' it will give an operation
> not permitted. One time it automaticly switched to 1 (the channel the AP
> runs on by default) and ran fine.
>
> If I change the AP to channel 10 it works fine right away.
>
> Am I missing something? Is it supposed to just switch channels
> automaticly? Do I have to tell it to scan the channels? This is my first
> experience with wireless under any system.
>
> I think thats really my only issue, when I am on channel 10 everything
> works even WEP.

I've encountered limitations on setting other parameters of wireless
cards such as the RCS or frag threshold, but I've never seen a card deny
setting the channel. This isn't something silly like running iwconfig as
a regular user is it? What distro are you running? For example, in RH
you can set your wireless options in
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-<dev>
What happens when you set the channel in the config file?
~M