SMC Barricade / Actiontec PCI and hostap_pci


From: Jonathan Gittos (jonathan.gittos_at_marketpipe.com)
Date: 2002-07-11 18:20:54 UTC



OK - To teach me to be more humble after the recent success I crowed about on my T23 Thinkpad with hostap_pci I've now hit a "weird" problem.

Bought an SMC Barricade Wireless Broadband Router SMC7004AWBR(despite the glorious name its just an ethernet hub + wireless basestation) to share an ADSL connection. Configured all fine and can access it perfectly from a SuSE 7.2 or 8.0 linux box via the ethernet ports, browse the web etc but can not get onto the web from the T23 (SuSE 8.0) via wireless. Same machine works perfectly if booted into Windows 2000 and also works fine accessing a neighbours 802.11 network in Linux and many other networks too.

So (and hang with me here - it will all soon be clear) everything is fine except when I try to access my Barricade from the T23 on linux via wireless
- which is what I bought it for :-( ....

Symptoms are as follows: T23 picks up the Barricade fine and finds a healthy signal, picks up the ESSID and configures its IP address from the barricades DHCP server. Its even possible to ping the Barricade from the T23 with impressively tiny response times. HOWEVER its impossible to ping / browse past the barricade to any other machine attached to it or to the public internet. Seems as though the Barricade is refusing to masquerade / forward any of the packets from the SuSE box. To be clear it will do it if the same box / laptop is booted into Win2K. Seems like the packets might be broken / incomplete in some way and the Barricade is sufficiently picky that it doesn't like it - however its impossible to "sniff" any of the packets to see. Solutions might be:

  1. Tweak the wireless settings / driver settings on the T23 to fix the packets - any ideas?
  2. Upgrade the driver - I'm using hostap_pci from Prism2-2002-05-19.tar.gz compiled on SuSE 8.0 with kernel 2.4.18 (stock SuSE kernel). PCI wireless describes itself as a Harris Semiconductor / Actiontec wireless card which I believe is using a Prism 2.5 chipset and hostap_pci seems to bind to it flawlessly - although I'm confused by some of the output below:

Jul 11 18:15:46 nabakov kernel: hostap_pci: hostap_pci.c 0.0.0 2002-05-19 (SSH

Communications Security Corp,                                  Jouni Malinen)
Jul 11 18:15:46 nabakov kernel: hostap_pci: (c) SSH Communications Security Corp <jkm_at_ssh.com>
Jul 11 18:15:46 nabakov kernel: PCI: Found IRQ 11 for device 02:02.0
Jul 11 18:15:46 nabakov kernel: PCI: Sharing IRQ 11 with 00:1d.2
Jul 11 18:15:46 nabakov kernel: PCI: Sharing IRQ 11 with 00:1f.1
Jul 11 18:15:46 nabakov kernel: hostap_pci: Registered netdevice wlan0
Jul 11 18:15:46 nabakov kernel: prism2_hw_init()
Jul 11 18:15:46 nabakov kernel: prism2_hw_config: initialized in 17672 
iterations
Jul 11 18:15:46 nabakov kernel: wlan0: NIC: id=0x8013 v1.0.0
Jul 11 18:15:46 nabakov kernel: wlan0: PRI: id=0x15 v1.0.7
Jul 11 18:15:46 nabakov kernel: wlan0: STA: id=0x1f v1.3.6
Jul 11 18:15:46 nabakov kernel: wlan0: Intersil Prism2.5 PCI: mem=0xec000000, 
irq=11
Jul 11 18:15:48 nabakov /etc/hotplug/net.agent[3577]: No HW description found ... exiting
Jul 11 18:16:00 nabakov /etc/hotplug/net.agent[3601]: No HW description found ... exiting

3) Return the Barricade on the grounds that it its not good enough for my T23 running SuSE then its not good enough for me....I have since discovered that others have had problems with it being picky with Orinoco drivers: http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&selm=uclg0cuh8eg.fsf%40gs138.sp.cs.cmu.edu
- if you read the full thread the problem did get fixed but there are also
some dreadful reviews on CNET - anyone had problems with this thing?

Regards

Jonathan Gittos



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4.