Using wireless at home and at school.

[infiniphunk]

Maybe someone knows an easier way to do this, I don't. Here's the deal. My girlfriend is as happy as ever now that she has linux(knoppix) on her laptop(toshiba satellite A10); its nice and stable, there isn't all kinds of stupid pop-ups and annoyances like in windows. Great! So I have her wireless card set up so that it works at our house with the ESSID and WEP-key as we have it, but my concern was that at the college of course they have a different essid name and different WEP-key. From past experience I have found that its very hard to set up the wireless card using wlcardconfig if the encryption is already on, sooo....
We went to the school today to try and set it up to work. We started the laptop and if we opened the browser it said "no luck buddy finding your homepage, you're SOL..." -or something like that. Anyway, I edited /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts with the schoold ESSID and WEP. I rebooted cause I'm not sure sure what command to use to restart the network card(something "restart"? -not sure) and after we rebooted it worked. So we found that its a simple matter of editing /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts with the appropriate info and rebooting and then the laptop was online.
Now my question is: is there an easier way to do this? She is good at typing and really doesn't have a problem with editing a text file on her system to get online, but is there an easier way? Just knowing how to restart the network device from the terminal so that it works with the new values in wireless.opts would make it much easier than having to reboot completely. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!!! Thanks in advance dudes and dudettes!!!!

[xlilo]

i dont know about the command in your distro but in suse it is......
/etc/init.d/network restart

try it it may be the same in your distro.
xlilo.

[johntramp]

if you have 2 copies of the /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts file, one for school and one for home, it would only be a small script to swap them over and restart the nic, when you find out what the command is ;)
gentoo it is /etc/init.d/net.ethx restart

[infiniphunk]

That's weird, I searched everywhere in there and cannot find something called "network restart". The laptop has knoppix on it. I use mepis on my desktop and same thing, I can't find any such program under /etc...
Am I going blind? Does someone know if its called something else in knoppix?

[techwise]

the "network restart" that people mentioned is not a program. Usually is is an optional cammand added to a script. In which case the script is "network" and the command is "restart", or stop or start as the case may be. The script contains the necessary commands to get the networking services started for your machine.

Your issue is simple, you just need to have an alternate wireless profile for the network services to look to when at school.

I cant tell you how to do it on knoppix though

[canon006]

If she's using KDE this (http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=14221) might do the trick. If she's a Gnome user I believe there's a similar app.