Problems setting bit rate (Orinoco driver; Kernel 2.4.19)

[Jim Carter]

On Sun, 29 Dec 2002, Georg C. F. Greve wrote:
> I am currently trying to connect my laptop and firewall with a
> wireless network. Both cards are PCMCIA Lucent cards, the firewall
> uses a Texas Instruments PCI1410 PC card Cardbus Controller (rev 01).
>
> Both systems run Debian with Kernel 2.4.19 and the 0.1.15
> linux-wlan-ng & 3.2.2 pcmcia-cs packages.
>
> It seems to run almost fine, but I am also experiencing the bit rate
> problem that some people have apparently reported in the past; but so
> far I haven't seen anyone knowing what the reason is or how to fix it.

This is an Ad-Hoc network, right?  Not Managed; no access point.  Just
leave the speed at the default (auto).  I've found that iwconfig reports
the speed that the card most recently used, and some administrative frames
go at 2 MBit/sec even if the card is willing to do 11 MBit/sec for bulk
data.  Copy a big file over the net and time it.  A speed of 3 to 6
MBit/sec (400 to 800 KByte/sec) indicates that your cards are operating
properly at 11 MBit/sec.  There's a lot more overhead than on wired
Ethernet.

It would help to set the speed explicitly to a low value if you know you
have a bad signal and you don't want the card to take the time to try and
fail to use 11 MBit/sec on most packets.

On the "iwconfig eth3 commit" problem, maybe the wireless tools and/or the
wireless extensions in the kernel and/or driver are not recent enough to
include it.  I think it's pretty new.  The latest Wireless Tools is v26.

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)