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Saturday, January 04, 2003 Gawdammit
So I had time today to fiddle with the x86 access point. My raw materials were:
[Micron ClientPro VXE] (64mb RAM, Pentium I MMX 166, PCI and ISA slots)
[Siemens SpeedStream 1023] PCI PCMCIA adapter
[enGenius 100mW 2011CD+] wireless card
3com 905b NIC
[cqure AP floppy]
I started by creating the cqureAP floppy in Win98 using the floppy image and [rawwrite for windows] which worked well. I had to modify the bios settings so the machine would boot off a floppy, which was a pain but didn't take long. With the PCI PCMCIA adapter inside with the enGenius card and the 3com NIC, I booted from the cqure floppy- and got nothing. It didn't recognize the 905b (for whatever reason, 3com drivers aren't usually part of a linux distribution), and saw the PCI PCMCIA adapter not as a PCMCIA bus, but as a network card on IRQ 11.
After much fiddling, with the machine booted into Win98, I did get the PCI PCMCIA adapter working with the enGenius card, but:
•Could not flash the enGenius card's ROM to version 1.4.9
•Win98 didn't see the PCI card as a PCMCIA bus, but as a network card.
Which was all pretty damn annoying. With Intersil's diagnostics I was able to put the card into HostAP mode with the 1.3.4 firmware, but the Powerbook could not see the SSID it was broadcasting. Interstil's utilities for this can be found [here]. It's supposed to include the "WinUpdate" firmware flash utility, but in fact doesn't. I found that the DLink driver package you can download from [here] is far more complete and does have the WinUpdate utility (as far as I have found, the 0.5.1 version is newest). Doing a google search for [prism firmware WinUpdate] will get you a lot of mailing list posts on this. Be sure to backup your old firmware first. I couldn't flash the card because it was telling the system that it was a Siemen's card because of something on the PCI card, and it didn't see the PCMCIA card itself, so the firmware updates for the Sendao/enGenius card wouldn't take on what it thought was a Siemens card.
Bleh.
So if I can get a PCI PCMCIA or ISA bridge that doesn't do something foolish like tell the system that it's a network card, it should work.
Should.
[ 1/04/2003 09:15:00 PM ] [
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