Wireless WPA config of Belkin 7050 USB at boot time in ifcfg

Hello all,

I have recently installed CentOS4.4/2.6.9 and would like to
autoconfigure my WLAN device at boot.

The device is a Belkin 7050 USB and I downloaded the rt73 driver from
rt2x00.serialmonkey.com. Apart from a small compile problem, I was
able to modprobe this and see the device. I then wrote a short script
called usbup.ksh which sets the essid, auth type, wpapsk and so on
using iwconfig and iwpriv. Again, after some tweaking this now works
fine and I can connect using WPA-AES and access the internet by
running usbup.ksh from the shell when I boot. However, I am having
trouble automating this.

My first step was to create an ifcfg-rausb0 script with basics e.g.
ONBOOT='yes. This sort-of works with service network restart (it
paniced the kernel once at network down). But I don't understand how
to integrate calls to iwprivs. I tried to add them as indicated in the
ifup comments but they don't seem to work. Can anyone post an example
of an icfg script which uses iwprivs?

On a related note, I am using dhclient to assign an IP to the card
from my Linksys WRT54GS router but there are two problems:

- occasionally, it just doesn't work. About a dozen DHCP requests are
sent out and dhclient then sleeps. If I kill it and retry, it connects
immediately. Throughout this, the AP is visible with a strong signal
using iwlist rausb0 scan - it just seems to randomly not work. Has
anyone seen or worked around this?

- secondly, I would like to host oracle on this box and I'm told it is
happier with a static IP. If I just assign a static IP in ifcfg and
then associate with the AP as usual using iwprivs/iwconfig should I be
able to connect (assuming no IP number clashes which are unlikely in
such a small private network)?

Most importantly though I would really appreciate any insight into
configuring it at boot time.

Cheers,
cam

Background: instructions at http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/fc4ho...fc4_howto.html
and some notes specifically about the 7050/rt73 combination at
http://fedoranews.org/cms/node/2540