Re: Wireless setup

[Bill Moseley <moseley@hank.org>]

Peter Hicks <petong@jah.net> wrote:
>I have the same SMC card as you do, I have had success with both the
>kernel Hermes drivers, as well as the linux-wlan-ng drivers. I have
>found that the linux-wlan drivers work a little better, though. I can
>give you a step by step to get them running.

Thanks for the info.

Turns out that my installation seems to have everything I needed, although
it's not working very well.

I spent another hour reading more about wireless and what I'd need to do to
compile my kernel and then I decided to just try duplicating my eth0 setup
as eth1 in /etc/network/interfaces and then ran:

    # ifdown eth0 && ifup eth1

and it started working right away.  Plugging in the card now enables the
interface on eth1 (the wireless), so now I just need to figure out how to
adjust the /etc/pcmcia scripts to bring down eth0 when eth1 goes up, and
how to deal with DHCP when away from my lan.

But the *big* problem now is speed.  Downloading on my wired lan (on my
DSL) I get about 80K/second, but the wireless card downloading the same
file gets only about 10K/second.  I can't see any problems.
Syslog/messages doesn't show anything odd, and iwconfig and ifconfig look
reasonable, AFAIK.

Any ideas?  Rebooting into Windows and the card downloads at my DSL speed
limit.  I'm only a foot from the access point.  And when it's downloading
over the wireless my ssh connections into the laptop from my linux desktop
can hardly squeeze in a packet.

laptop:/var/log# iwconfig
eth1      IEEE 802.11-DS  ESSID:"WLAN"  Nickname:"Prism  I"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.462GHz  Access Point: 00:90:D1:01:0C:CC
          Bit Rate:11Mb/s   Tx-Power=15 dBm   Sensitivity:1/3  
          Retry min limit:8   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:69/92  Signal level:-33 dBm  Noise level:-149 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

laptop:/var/log# ifconfig
eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:E0:29:9E:80:5E  
          inet addr:192.168.0.3  Bcast:192.168.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:13415 errors:71 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:71
          TX packets:7525 errors:191 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:100 
          RX bytes:19454484 (18.5 MiB)  TX bytes:1012932 (989.1 KiB)
          Interrupt:3 Base address:0x100 

I guess there's a few errors in there, but not enough to make it run so slow.

Module                  Size  Used by    Not tainted
orinoco_cs              4712   2 
orinoco                29568   0  [orinoco_cs]
hermes                  3296   0  [orinoco_cs orinoco]
ds                      6624   2  [orinoco_cs]
i82365                 22416   2 
pcmcia_core            41440   0  [orinoco_cs ds i82365]
apm                     9180   2  (autoclean)
eepro100               17264   1 
keybdev                 1664   0  (unused)
usbkbd                  2816   0  (unused)
usb-uhci               20708   0  (unused)
usbcore                48128   0  [usbkbd usb-uhci]

Interesting (or not) to note that once I swap interfaces on the laptop that
my other linux machines can reconnect to the laptop but my windows machine
can't.

Thanks,
-- 
Bill Moseley
mailto:moseley@hank.org


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