Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 01:08:16 -0700 (PDT) From: David Kulp <pippilongo@yahoo.com> To: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Subject: So many cards, so little to do Message-ID: <20020917080816.34167.qmail@web12907.mail.yahoo.com>
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I have scavenged from various sources 1. Orinoco Silver (11Mbps wireless PCMCIA card) 2. ISA-PCMCIA bridged (VADEM VG-469) 3. 3COM 3CRWE62092A (11 Mbps wireless PCMCIA card with funky spring-loaded extendo antenna) 4. 2 ZoomAir 4000 (2Mbps wireless PCMCIA card) 5. One desktop workstation (with an ISA slot -- hard to come by these days -- and a 10BaseT ethernet connection to the outside) 6. 3 laptops running various releases of Windows, each with at least one PCMCIA slot You'd think I could do something *interesting* with all this, but so far only questions. I'd like to set up a wireless access point, firewall, and NAT on the workstation. I have the latest CVSup'd FreeBSD-4 stable and up-to-date kernel. The ISA-PCMCIA bridge is installed and works fine. The Orinoco card works with FreeBSD, but none of the other cards. (The 3COM won't fit into the slot.) The ZoomAir cards are recognized by pccardd, but are assigned to the 'awi' driver. This driver seems to be completely non-functional and the README in /usr/src seems to suggest as much. I though Zoom cards used the PRISM chip, which the 'wi' driver claims to support. I changed pccard.conf to use 'wi', but this fails miserably with many "wi0: wi_cmd: ..." errors. This is rather disappointing, because I was hoping to use a ZoomAir card to make an access point. Any help with a driver for ZoomAir 2Mb cards? Isn't it a PRISM? Now I can use the Orinoco card with FreeBSD, but I get the strangest behavior. The other cards can only be used in Windows laptops (remember I can't get the 3COM or Zoom cards to work in FreeBSD). Here is the scenario. Zoom and Orinoco can talk happily in an "Adhoc" (Zoom's Windows client) aka "Peer-to-peer" (Orinoco's Windows client) configuration. FreeBSD with Orinoco can join such a configuration, but wicontrol must be set to "BSS" (aka "infrastructure" or "access point mode")! And the 3COM cannot join such a configuration at all. This makes no sense to me. Why would BSS mode (wicontrol -p 1) work with an ad-hoc network configuration? Last, the 3COM card does not support WEP for ad-hoc mode, only for access points. Is this the correct behavior? I have had no success if I set "wicontrol -p 3". So, in summary: 1. Any advice for the ZoomAir 4000? Is it PRISM? What driver is recommended? 2. Am I misunderstanding BSS vs ad-hoc? I find that BSS works with Windows clients running "Adhoc" or "peer-to-peer". 3. Is WEP only for access points, or is 3COM messing with me? 4. Is it possible to build a wireless access point on a FreeBSD computer given the pieces I have? Thanks! -p Postscript for the thirsty: I finally upgraded the Orinoco Silver firmware to 8.10 after spending a day trying to figure out why I was getting lots of "wi0: watchdog timeout" and "wi0: busy bit won't clear". Based on other posts I was sure that I had an IRQ conflict or an out of date driver or an old kernel, or... etc. Finally problem solved. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! News - Today's headlines http://news.yahoo.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" in the body of the message
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