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I bought an Aorus motherboard and made a pretty decent home server out of it (with other purchased parts). The mobo came with a WiFi adapter which plugs/screws into the mobo peripheral socket bay via a radio-like (so like, 2 cable-type sockets, 2 coaxes) socket. I am running Ubuntu (not sure what version, downloaded recently so possibly Bionic, but the server CLI version). X-win isn't installed. The OS didn't come with iw (the new version of iwconfig) but it did come with ifconfig. I can't copy paste the output of ifconfig or other commands from the server easily because I am writing this post on my laptop PC (also Ubuntu Bionic, non-server, yes x-win), so I will try to paraphrase outputs as best I can. In any case, ifconfig yields just lo, and going ifconfig up wlan0 doesn't work (wlan0: Host name lookup failure).

The output of dmesg on the server is huge, and going dmesg | less would take probably hours (hyperbole?) to look through for the WiFi card. I had two USB WiFi cards also plugged into the server, but doing the following indicated they weren't detected in the devices /dev folder:

dir /dev

plug in wifi adapter

dir /dev

unplug wifi adapter

dir /dev

Check which /dev file showed up when the wifi adapter was plugged in

So, no changes to /dev contents when the USB wifi adapters were plugged into the server. I could try this for the coax wifi adapter that shipped with the mobo, but I expect it wouldn't show up either, and it doesn't really matter whether it does or not because I really need it mounted. Currently my server is only on localhost, without an ethernet connection (has an ethernet socket, but none in the wall in my room--only a phone and a coax socket in the wall). I don't want to bring the server downstairs to the router and plug straight into it wired b/c it's a heavy giant Rosewill case, so that's mondo inconvenient. I figured transferring files would be easy enough. Turns out it is: I was able to dpkg -L iw and cp iw to a USB flash drive and onto /bin on the server from the PC laptop, so it works there now. But I don't know which /dev file is the wifi adapter on the server, so I can't just go iw up [wifi adapter name].

I hope this all makes sense. Looking forward to your engagement in my problems.

Much appreciated,

Mike

Michael Starr
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  • As far as I know, there are three ways to attach a wireless device to a computer. First is PCI. You can find those devices with: lspci Next is USB; find those with : lsusb Finally, in tablets and other small devices, SDIO. Find those with: dmesg | grep -i sdio Any help? Does the mobo manual have a specific name for this socket? – chili555 May 03 '20 at 20:51
  • "so like, 2 cable-type sockets, 2 coaxes" Aren't those simply the antenna connectors? – chili555 May 03 '20 at 22:45
  • Thanks, chili. None of those sockets are used in my adapter's connection; as you point out, yes, it is an antenna connector. So it's not PCI, it's not USB, and it's not SDIO. So, not to put you down or anything, but no, that doesn't help. I mean it eliminates some options, which helps, but it doesn't give me the solution. What I am going to do is look into the mobo's user manual, find out which brand of antenna it is, and see if there is some firmware I can download and upload onto the server to use. Thanks! – Michael Starr May 05 '20 at 16:59
  • Nix that. lspci works. Thanks! – Michael Starr May 05 '20 at 17:10
  • Okay I found a firmware package from Intel that may work. Where should I install it on the server? – Michael Starr May 05 '20 at 17:16
  • The PCI WiFi antenna is detected on pci: 7 network. It is DISABLED, and the driver is iwlwifi. How do I enable it? – Michael Starr May 05 '20 at 17:21
  • I solved it. On to bigger, greater problems! (See https://askubuntu.com/questions/1235782/how-to-enable-an-intel-pci-wifi-adapter-which-is-not-enabled-access-denied). – Michael Starr May 05 '20 at 18:06

1 Answers1

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sudo lshw | less

Find your device from the tree. Under logical name: will be the name of the device.

Michael Starr
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