Nick,

An "oddity" to report. I set up a new system on compatible hardware and installed, as a test, a broadcom mPCIe wireless. It is seen when doing a lspci as shows up as an
Network controller: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY (rev 01)

When I do a locate modinfo bcm4312 it errors with

locate: can not stat () `/var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db': No such file or directory.

If I remove bcm4312 and just do

locate modinfo

it errors the same way. When I go to my working home office ClearOS and do the same thing and I get

/boot/grub2/i386-pc/modinfo.sh
/usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/modinfo.sh
/usr/sbin/modinfo
/usr/share/man/man8/modinfo.8.gz

Somehow no data on any working NIC is present using 'locate modinfo'.

Where did I go wrong?

I installed ClearOS from CD, updated everything using yum update (had to install yum), then installed the files you specified above. ClearOS never did see the broadcom wireless even the system sees it. It is supposed to have AP mode and pretty good linux support. It has worked in Ubuntu, Mint and others.

Thanks again for any help.

John

Current state of play is that there is only an unofficial version of a reasonable wireless app.. Currently you can get it from my web site:

wget www.howitts.co.uk//clearos/ClearOS_7.x/app-wireless-ap-1.1.0-1.devel.noarch.rpm

wget www.howitts.co.uk//clearos/ClearOS_7.x/app-wireless-ap-core-1.1.0-1.devel.noarch.rpm

Then install with:

yum install app-wireless-ap*

You also need the testing version of app-network:

yum update app-network --enablerepo=clearos-updates-testing

Don't use it if you use upstream vlans.

Dual band radios can work in different ways. Some declare themselves as two different NICs. I would expect this to work. Others appear as two different radios on a single NIC. I have a feeling the Webconfig won't handle this.

As for compatible NIC's, I have no idea. You need the research the NIC with key words "linux driver" then see if ClearOS has the module using "locate", then, if you have the correct info, "modinfo module_name". Even then you may not get the right answer if you have the right module but it has not been upgraded for the latest NIC versions. It is tricky. I only have a couple of USB NIC's for testing, and one of those was a struggle to find a driver. When I found it I asked the people at ElRepo if they could make it available and they have done. You can also check ElRepo for updated drivers. Theirs are compatible with ClearOS. You can also try "centos 7" as key words for a search.

EXCELLENT!

Thank-you again sir!!!

John

The database for the locate command is updated nightly by the job /etc/cron.daily/mlocate. Can you try running it manually and see if it errors? You may not need the "locate" step. I use it to try to narrow down the driver and sometimes you find it has a slightly different name from what you bump into on the internet.

I think you may end up needing the b43 driver but that has been removed from Redhat/Centos/ClearOS and I would not know where to source it from. If you have the NIC, what PCI ID's do you get from:

lspci -knn | egrep -i 'Eth|net|wire' -A 3

Here is the output. Looks like the only kernal driver installed/in use is for the wired Realtek NIC.

01:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY [14e4:4315] (rev 01)
Subsystem: Dell Wireless 1397 WLAN Mini-Card [1028:000c]
03:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller [10ec:8168] (rev 07)
Subsystem: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device [10ec:0123]
Kernel driver in use: r8169
Kernel modules: r8169

For the RTL8111/8168/8411, you really want the r8168. Do a "yum install kmod-r816*" and reboot after installation. I think you can use the wl driver for your NIC. If so, you're in for a fun time. Have a look at the instructions on the ElRepo Website. To get ClearOS ready to build, it may be worth following these instructions, skipping installing the editor

Well done Nick... The ElRepo/ClearOS build systems must have some addons. Mine is just a vanilla development system...

I've just tried the ElRepo instructions but with the ClearOS instructions for the build system, and the wl driver builds but throws a couple of warnings. The instructions are quite straightforward but download the ElRepo dources to ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/. I can't test and as the Broadcom sources are non-redistributable I can't really publish them

Nick,

Lots of things to try and learn about! I will probably just try a few other cards and have my eyes on an Atheros card a friend has.

In any event, I found that my ClearOS boxes and the ones I have been setting up for my brother and nephew all use the Realtek 8168 NIC using the r8169 driver. So I updated things and all seems to be just fine. In googling the differences between the drivers i have found that most think it is minimal but that the 8168 driver, the one I went with, might be buggy.

And, as I recall, drivers are compiled into the kernel, correct? When ClearOS updates its kernel down the road, won't this driver update disappear from the next upcoming kernel? Will things just revert back to the r8169 driver? As long as all works after a reboot with a new kernel released by the Clear team, no worries even with the r8169 driver. I guess we can always update it again. But, will this driver be made part of upcoming kernels?

Tony, thanks for the info too on the server status of ClearOS. And other info!

Thanks!!!

John

OK used wl-kmod from elrepo and all compiled OK - seems it is necessary even though the Broadcom source includes some wl code. Just two warnings. Driver loads OK, but not able to test.
Edit:

[root@danda CentOS7]# lsmod | grep wl

wl                   6449773  0 

cfg80211              710770  1 wl

What makes you think the r8168 is buggy? The r8169 with this card can give all sorts of hard to diagnose problems - internet slowdowns, loss of DNS, ping issues and so on and often hard to diagnose, but is does not always. Try searching the forum.

In terms of upgrades, the kmod should always survive kernel upgrades within a point release of ClearOS. It will often survive an upgrade between point releases. the r8168 did not need to be recompiled for ClearOS 7.8 and some kmod drivers for longer. It just depends on what RedHat does with the kernel. In 6.x it even used to be stable between point releases. If it does need recompiling between point releases it is my responsibility to do that and it gets released at the same time as the main release so you should not have a problem there.

The drivers come directly from ElRepo but I make a slight change to the kmod-r8168. The kmod-r8169 is the same as theirs. The reason behind this is that their r8168 driver blacklists the r8169 so the two can't run at the same time. I don't like this as my old server has both NICs in it, so my compiled version does not do the blacklisting. Instead we recommend you install the kmod-r8169 driver as well as this has compatibility with the r8168 NIC removed. If you don't do that, there is the risk that the r8169 driver will still load against the RTL8111/8168/8411 as the stock r8169 and the kmod-r8168 both show as compatible. I did have that discussion with ElRepo, suggesting that the kmod-r8169 be made a dependency of the kmod-r8168, but I got nowhere with it.

As for making the driver part of the kernel, that is up to either RedHat or kernel.org, I am not sure which. We don't compile the kernel but take ours from upstream.

Realtek publishes the 8168 and 8169 linux driver sources on their website (amongst others). They are seperate and suspect the elrepo kmod rpms are built using these. At the moment elrepo are slightly behind with Realtek at 8.048.03 for the r8168 and 6.028.02 for the r8169. If you want the latest from Realtek, they are very easy to compile and install, but will require a few minutes re-compile with a kernel change.

The CentOS web-site shows the functionality of Realtek's r8168 and r8169 drivers was incorporated into the kernel's r8169 driver in July 2007. Not sure they got it right for the older kernels and prefer using code originating from Realtek. For some time downloaded and compiled the Realtek drivers directly until testing showed the kmod drivers were good, though sometimes not quite up to date.

Interestingly also run multiple Fedora systems here which use the kernel combined driver. Never had a problem with their r8169 driver with the installed r8168 NICs. However, Fedora has a much newer kernel, currently 5.8.10-200.fc32.x86_64 and modinfo for r8169 on Fedora displays quite differently to that of the CentOS kernel driver.

I thing kernel.org have taken a decision not to publish driver versions in their kernel modules and now just return the kernel version string. I probably would not agree with that decision but there we go.

Looks like maybe it is a Redhat omission ...
Ubuntu modinfo for r8169 driver shows "Version: "2.3LK-NAPI"
Checking r8169.c from generic 3.10 kernel source code shows the Version same as Ubuntu displays it...
extract from /drivers/net/ethernet/realtek/r8169.c

... snipped

#include <linux/pci-aspm.h>

#include <linux/prefetch.h>



#include <asm/io.h>

#include <asm/irq.h>



#define RTL8169_VERSION "2.3LK-NAPI"

#define MODULENAME "r8169"

#define PFX MODULENAME ": "



#define FIRMWARE_8168D_1        "rtl_nic/rtl8168d-1.fw"

#define FIRMWARE_8168D_2        "rtl_nic/rtl8168d-2.fw"

... snipped

I think I read in on an ElRepo post but I can't find it. My statement may only apply to a 5.x kernel, but it is definitely for when you look at the output of modinfo. I've no idea about inspecting sources. That is pretty much beyond me.

What makes you think the r8168 is buggy?

In Googling, and a lot of the posts were older, there were a lot of comments, or so it seemed, that stated the word "buggy" in the 8168 driver. And how one of the drivers always blacklisted the other which added to that confusion.

Your comments on things cleared the air very well and I thank you again!

John

Out of interest initially downloaded the Linux BCM4312 driver from Broadcom Website, after accepting their very strict conditions. The source is about 5 years old and does not compile on ClearSo 7.8.1 as is. Then found this and gave it away. Think your only hope is finding newer source from somewhere - Good Luck! You might be lucky :-) CentOS is a server OS and therefore drops support for older devices as these are no longer used by current server installations - especially wireless. The desktop distributions tend to retain them as these are still likely to be used in home etc situations.