Promiscuous strangeness with Prism II card + orinoco-0.11 driver

[Jim Carter]

On Fri, 26 Apr 2002, Jim Carter wrote:
> On a Linksys WPC11 (Intersil firmware 1.03), I routinely set spy mode, and
> I noticed a message in syslog that it was entering promiscuous mode.  I
> have had unending trouble with low data rates, even lower than yours, in an
> Ad-Hoc network where the partner is a Dell Truemobile 1150 (Lucent-Agere
> firmware 6.16)...

> I think I've been totally faking myself out...

> Confirmation of all this will have to wait until I go home, since I don't
> have the Linksys card with me at work, but be assured that I'll let you all
> know what happens when I get rid of the spy mode.

This is called grasping at straws. Promiscuous mode does not normally
happen, and most likely I saw the message in syslog because I was using
tcpdump. On my pair of cards, when I turn off spy mode (on one card or
both, including reloading the drivers to make *sure* it's gone), or when I
put the cards into promiscuous mode by running tcpdump, there is no effect
on the (slow) data rate, neither a speedup nor a slowdown.  I should have
known, because when I tested various driver versions, spy mode was never
used.

Back to square 1.  I still believe that the Linksys card doesn't ack any
packets, whereas the Dell card does.  But I don't have a network sniffer to
prove this.

James F. Carter          Voice 310 825 2897    FAX 310 206 6673
UCLA-Mathnet;  6115 MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA, USA  90095-1555
Email: jimc at math.ucla.edu    http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc (q.v. for PGP key)