I'm trying to help convert my boss over to Linux. He has an HP/Compaq PC on which he installed Fedora Core 4 on. It's got a Linksys wireless card in it and we're using the NDIS wrapper to load the Windows driver for the chipset on that card. 'iwconfig' sees the card. We can configure the card. And when he has his wired NIC plugged in, I can actually ping both his wired AND his WIRELESS IP addresses. But as soon as he disconnects the cable, I lose contact with his wireless NIC.

Even stranger, I was actually able to ssh into his box via the wireless IP address, and do an ifdown eth0 and remain connected (as long as his wired NIC was plugged in). If I do an 'ifconfig' when his eth0 is down all I see is 'wlan0' and 'lo'. So it would SEEM that the WLAN card is working but is somehow realy being routed through his wired NIC. It doesn't make sense. I've tried configuring his system so that the wired NIC doesn't come up at boot, but then he gets no access (even though 'iwconfig' says it sees the access point). I've tried manually forcing the system to use wlan0 to get to it's default route but it can't. Oddly, if I change the encryption key for the wlan0 card, it losses contact with the access point and displays all zeros for the AP Mac address, but as soon as I put the right key back in... it gets the AP MAC address back!

This is one of the strangest issues I've ever run into and I can't seem to figure out what's causing it. Any ideas? (NOTE: The AP is a Cisco AP, not Linksys) The NIC itself appears to be using a Broadcom chip:

05:04.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03)