Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2008 21:51:30 -0700 From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@tristatelogic.com> To: freebsd-net@freebsd.org Subject: WMP54g, ral(4) driver, & 7.0-RELEASE -- Thanks, question, & comments Message-ID: <74565.1207284690@tristatelogic.com>
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I just wanted to drop a line and say "Thanks!" to everybody who worked on getting support for the Linksys WMP54g v4/v4.1 (and the RT2561C chipset - now supported by the ral(4) driver) into 7.0-RELEASE. I'm a total wireless neophite, but after a modest amount of fiddling and Reading of the Fine Manual, this card... I have the v4.1 version... seems to be working great for me. So thanks to all who had a hand in that. I do have one (or maybe two) small questions however. It appears that if one has this card and one does an "ifconfig ral0 scan", that this scan will hang forever _unless_ there is something out there for the card to find, i.e. something it can talk to. Is that by design, or did somebody just forget to slip in a timeout someplace? Also, I've seen this exact same "hang forever during a scan" behavior now in another context too, and it seems really weird... I can't explain it, and I hope that somebody else will take a stab at explaining it to me. I have purchased a shiny new Linksys WRT54G router to keep my shiny new Linksys WMP54g wireless PCI card company, and strangly/inexplicably, it seems that if I configure the router for either "WPA Personal" or "WPA2 Personal" security _and_ then also select just "AES" rather than the other choice, which is "TKIP+AES", then in this case also, doing an "ifconfig ral0 scan" back on the machine with the WMP54g card in it seems to hang forever. Does anybody have any idea why that might happen? It's no big deal. The obvious workaround is just to leave "TKIP+AES" set on the WRT54G all of the time, and that seems to work fine. Now that I've gotten my question out of the way, a few comments. I'm providing these in the hope sthat they may perhaps help some other wireless neophites who, like me, are just getting started with wireless stuff. Firstly, to any of you other folks out there who are just getting ready to buy components, and who want to do some wirless networking with FreeBSD, allow me to suggest that you _not_ buy an ASUS WL-138G. These are currently available from Newegg, and are pretty inexpensive (about $19 bucks) but (as I learned _after_ I bought one) the chipset of those is a Marvell chipset, and thus, the thing ain't directly supported by BSD. You gotta use a clever kludge... it's very clever, but its still a kludge... called "ndiswrapper" to get BSD to talk to the Marvell chipset. And under that approach, you're basically using a (non-open) Windoze driver for the chipset which gets magically wedged into BSD (or Linux) via the magic of ndiswrapper. All things considered, its better to get a card that has a chipset that's natively supported by your own kernel. I'm sure that the ASUS WL-138G, like all ASUS products, is a fine product and a find card, but if anybody wants one, I happen to be selling one, cheap. As regards to the Linksys WMP54g (v4/v4.1) PCI wireless card... well... the kernel didn't even see it as being present under FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE, but thankfully, that has now been corrected, and under FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE the card seems to work just peachy. Looking at all of the wireless-G PCI cards available at Newegg right now, this is certainly one of the less expensive ones (around $39 bucks as of this writing) so that fact that FreeBSD now supports it is really helpful. (And, as you might expect, it seems to play well with the Linksys WRT54G router, which is also really inexpensive at Newegg right now... around $43 bucks.) That's all. I hope thatthis infor will be helpful to others. Regards, rfg
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