Suse 8.1 MELCO problem - Solved

[Anthony Culligan]

Credit to David Gibson and Matt Johnstone
 
I upgraded the cards to ones with more recent firmware and set the ESSID
to 1234 instead of 'any'.  I understand this is a requirement of the
IBSS ad-hoc mode.
 
Anthony
 
-----Original Message-----
From: wireless-admin at lists.samba.org
[mailto:wireless-admin at lists.samba.org] On Behalf Of Anthony Culligan
Sent: 02 December 2002 14:26
To: wireless at lists.samba.org
Subject: Suse 8.1 MELCO problem
 
I have installed wireless network cards on two hosts and wish to
communicate on an ad hoc basis.  The first works perfectly.  The second
not at all - although it communicates well when I dual boot the second
machine under Windows98.  I am using MELCO pcmcia cards.  On removing
and then replacing the cards, I can examine the /var/log/messages file
and observe that there are differences in how the cardmgr loads the
required modules. Both hosts identify the card correctly as MELCO
WLI-PCM-L11.  On the first host, the card 'looks like a Lucent/Agere
firmware version 6.04'.  On the second host (the one that does not work)
I see a similar message but the version is '6.08'.  This is regardless
of which card I actually insert in the slot.  The second host then has
an additional message in the initialisation - 'IEEE standard IBSS ad-hoc
mode supported'  Subsequently, the second host has numerous messages
stating that 'eth0: this firmware requires an ESSID in IBSS-Adhoc mode'
followed by a timeout message.   The wilist and wiconfig utilities work
well on the first host but appear not to on the second host.  I have
tried setting ESSID to 'any' using YasT2 (SuSe graphical config tool)
but it does not have any impact.  Running a wiconfig command shows the
frequency at 42.6GHz.  iwconfig commands to change the frequency,
channel and to set the ESSID to 'any' seem to have no effect.  Running
wilist to view available frequencies or channels states that there are
no options. A further difference between the two machines on hotplug is
that whilst they both appear to load the same modules, the first machine
does a check and then a modprobe whilst the second machine simply
executes a series of insmod commands loading the modules from the
/lib/modules/2.4.19-4GB//pcmcia-external/.  The modules loaded are
orinoco_cs, orinoco and hermes.
 
Any ideas?
 
-------------- next part --------------
HTML attachment scrubbed and removed