IBM card not working ...

David Gibson david at gibson.dropbear.id.au
Mon Feb 25 09:39:59 EST 2002


On Sun, Feb 24, 2002 at 03:08:23PM +0000, Paul Millar wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've got an IBM High Rate Wireless LAN card which I've been trying to get
> to work, but can't. I was hoping someone might spot what's wrong. I don't
> think I'm doing anything stupid (famous last words ...)
> 
> There are a number of oddities with the card. I don't know which are
> important and which are irrelevant so this email's probably a bit rambling
> in nature.
> 
> The card identifies itself (cardctrl ident) as:
> 
> "IBM Corporation", "IBM High Rate Wireless 
> LAN PC Card", "Version 01.01", "" with manfid: 0x0156, 0x0002
> 
> but my /etc/pcmcia/config has that manfid as an "Intersil PRISM2". I can't
> remember which driver this was bound to, but I've configured it to use the
> orinoco_cs driver.

That manfid is unfortunately used by most of the manufacturers making
cards using the Prism2 chipset (which includes the IBM card).

> The driver reports a Lucent/Agere firmware 6.16 w/ Ad-hoc demo and IBSS
> ad-hoc support. I'm trying to use v0.9b of the driver as supplied with
> 2.4.18-rc2. The driver claims to have initalised correctly and a new
> device (eth1) is registered.
> 
> Another oddity is with ESSID. I'm using latest stable wireless tools
> (v23). If I try to change the ESSID (both in ad-hoc and managed mode)
> iwconfig gives no error message, but the ESSID remains at "" (empty
> string).
> 
> I changed the scheme (in /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts) to change the value of
> ESSID, but both restarting the pcmcia service and ejecting/reinserting the
> card failed to set ESSID to anything other than "". I also tried adding
> the reset_cor=1 module option in config.opts, but this didn't help either.

Note that the ESSID will not be displayed properly if the interface is
not up.  This is misleading, but I haven't had time to fix it yet.

> Yet another problem is ad-hoc mode doesn't work. The card sits quietly
> without transmitting anything and doesn't detect another laptop in range.

Are you using the same ad-hoc mode - there is both IBSS (802.11
standard) ad-hoc mode (the default) and demo (Lucent proprietary)
ad-hoc mode which are not interoperable.  If the other stations are
using demo ad-hoc mode, use the command "iwpriv ethXX set_port3 1" to
activate this mode.

-- 
David Gibson			| For every complex problem there is a
david at gibson.dropbear.id.au	| solution which is simple, neat and
				| wrong.  -- H.L. Mencken
http://www.ozlabs.org/people/dgibson





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