Re: problems with deXlan (Intersil) wifi pcmcia card
On Fri, Nov 07, 2008 at 07:15:11PM +0100, Bernard wrote:
> According to what I have read, the 'orinoco' driver that is supposed to
> also work for my 'intersil prism2' pcmcia card, does not support WPA.
indeed
> Before I learnt that, I did try to remove 'hostap'. I tried several
...
> hostap_cs.conf, so as to bind my intersil card to orinoco, but, by then,
> I had realized that in any case this was not wpa compatible, so I didn't
> bother.
note that hostap* pkgs and hostap driver are different matter: the 1st are
the pkgs while the latter is the kernel driver.
For AP station you need hostapd, for client station wpa_supplicant.
But you also need to check that your card can actually support WPA:
> "Station firmware version needs to be 1.7.0 or newer to work in WPA mode"
that's the culprint now.
> I suppose that the so called 'station firmware', or 'STA firmware', is
> the peace of software that is inside the pcmcia card... ? How am I to
> know which version it is ? There is nothing written on it for that matter.
- check card docs
- check card with card's own utils (if any)
- check dmesg output on driver load
eg I've got an old Avaya orinoco_cs card:
eth1: Hardware identity 0001:0001:0004:0002
eth1: Station identity 001f:0001:0007:001c
eth1: Firmware determined as Lucent/Agere 7.28
eth1: Ad-hoc demo mode supported
eth1: IEEE standard IBSS ad-hoc mode supported
eth1: WEP supported, 104-bit key
eth1: MAC address 00:02:2d:xx:xx:xx
eth1: Station name "HERMES I"
eth1: ready
eth1: orinoco_cs at 0.0, irq 3, io 0x3100-0x313f
and got latest fw from vendors's site. This card isn't supported by
hostap_cs, nor it would support WPA at all. 802.1x could be a better option
then plain WEP anyway, but for my needs WEP104 is/was fine.
- check prism2 sites, suitable fw may be avail there - beware though that
a wrong fw may turn your card into a brick.
- if you can't use WEP, and your card can't do WAP, and you can't setup a
VPN (like your case, for a simple DSL modem on the other end), well, you
have no choice but buy another card/USB-wlan.
HTH
--
paolo
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