Newbie: Orinoco Silver/SMC Barricade/wvlan_cs problems

[Pauline Powledge]

Hi,

I am making my first stab at a home wireless lan, and am
having configuration problems: when I try to ping my SMC
Barricade (Prism based) AP from my Orinoco silver card on my
RedHat 6.2 laptop, I get a "destination host unreachable."

When I switch the IP of my wired gateway to that of the
Barricade and replace the Orinoco with a wired Ethernet 
PCMCIA card and restart the network, I can ping that
wired gateway just fine. For that reason, I think that 
my ifcfg-eth0/network.opts/routing table is set up correctly.

Since my laptop is dual-boot with Win98, and the card talks
with the Barricade without problems in that OS, I think this
isn't a faulty hardware problem.

So that leaves me looking at wireless.opts and the driver.
I'm using wvlan_cs, which I understand is deprecated; however
I do not plan to upgrade to a 2.4 kernel soon and so cannot
use the orinoco_cs driver. 

"Lsmod" shows the driver loaded and there are no error 
messages for wvlan_cs in my syslog.  The only cardctl 
strangeness I see if that "config" tells me the Orinoco 
is a memory type card; on the other hand it tells me the
same thing with my wired Ethernet PCMCIA card, which works
fine. My config.opts looks sane, as does my 
/etc/modules.conf. I did have to tweak my wireless.opts to 
check for a MAC address of ...12:1D for the Orinoco. I've
been using the example wireless.opts files from Rob 
Flickenger's articles and book as a guide, except that I
have changed the mode to managed.

Iwconfig looks fairly sane -- it has the correct ESSID and 
the correct frequency -- but it does offer what might be a 
clue. That is, the access point MAC address reported by 
Iwconfig is off by one byte, as compared to the access point 
MAC address reported by Orinoco's client manager under Win98. 

At this point, I'm about out of ideas of how to diagnose my
problem further. I'd be very grateful for any suggestions about
how to proceed.

Here's the nitty gritty revision details:

	- RedHat 6.2, 2.2.14-5.0 kernel
	- Lucent/Orinoco silver card, flashed to firmware revision 8.10
	- David Hinds's PCMCIA package, version 3.1.24
	- Jean Tourrilhes's wireless tools package, verison 22
	- SMC Wireless Barricade 7004AWBR, firmware revision 1.92c

Thank you in advance for your help.

Polly Powledge
pollyp at drizzle.com