linux/netbsd wireless interoperability

[David Gibson]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2003 at 11:57:33AM +0930, Brett Lymn wrote:
> 
> Hi Folks,
>         For a long time I have been using a pair of Toshiba wireless
> cards (just rebadged lucent golds) in ad-hoc mode with a pair of
> NetBSD machines.  The setup works without problems for me.  Now I have
> taken it into my head that I want to be able have one of my machines
> running linux.  I have Red Hat 9 on one machine, I think I have things
> setup ok because the wireless network interface appears to be up and
> running BUT I cannot manage to ping my NetBSD machine.  I have tried
> twiddling various things on both linux and NetBSD (turning wep on,
> turning it off), checking both sides are running on the same channel
> and so forth but still no joy.  Has anyone got any
> guidance/help/suggestions?

Chances are the problem is that the NetBSD box is using the old "demo"
ad-hoc mode, wheras the Linux box is using the 802.11 standardised
IBSS ad-hoc mode - they're not interoperable.

I think you need to set port_type to 1 and createibss to 1 with witool
to switch NetBSD to IBSS mode.

> BTW one thing I have noticed is that the tx/activity/whatever_it_is
> led on the linux card always seems to be flickering - this does not
> happen on NetBSD where the led only flickers when there is network
> traffic.  Could this be a clue that I have something wrong?
> 

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