WPC11 issues with wvlan vs orinico/hermes

Jim Carter jimc at math.ucla.edu
Wed Aug 14 10:09:37 EST 2002


On Mon, 12 Aug 2002, Jason Radford wrote:
> I recently purchased a cheap compaq laptop to play with wireless, and
> purchased a Linksys WPC11 wireless card.  I have tested 2 distros,
> mandrake and slackware, but I want to use slackware.
>
> Mandrake (9.0 beta 2) uses pcmcia 3.1.29, which loads the wvlan_cs
> module, and seems to work perfectly giving me aprox 300-400k transfers.
>
> Slackware 8.1 uses 3.1.33 or .34, and loads orinoco/hermes drivers,
> and does initialize the card, but I only seem to get 10-12k transfers.

The first question is, who is the partner? And what mode are you running
in? And what is the firmware version on both?  The output of "iwconfig
eth1" and "ifconfig eth1", plus the relevant debug-level messages from your
syslog on both machines, would be helpful at the beginning of resolving a
problem.  (For form's sake replace the WEP key with X's, if used, not that
people take WEP so seriously any more.)

I had similar problems with a Linksys WPC11 (Intersil firmware 1.0.3)
talking to a Dell TrueMobile 1150 Mini-PCI card (Agere firmware 6.16,
similar to Agere Orinoco) in Ad-Hoc mode. Someone else with this
combination and a network sniffer discovered that the WPC11 failed to send
802.11b ACK packets, and I'm sure you can imagine the time-consuming
thrashing that caused, with large values in the error counters revealed by
"iwconfig eth1".

To make an overly long story short, I bought an Agere AP-200 access point,
changing to Managed mode, and the Dell <-> AP-200 link is just peachy.

It's very interesting that you got near full speed transfers with wvlan_cs.
This suggests that they do something different from Orinoco.  I looked in
detail at wvlan_ng, finding nothing magical, but have never actually tried
wvlan_cs.

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)




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