[Prism54-users] loading firmware

[Franco]

Dear Hans,

thank you for your answer, sorry if I didn't 
reply back sooner but I hadn't a chance for it before.

> loading the firmware! I had the same troubles.  Do you run Redhat?

Ehm sort of. I am currently running Fedora Core 2 on all the 3 PCs
I'm trying to network together. They all have prism54 cards
and there is a wireless AP/gateway/modem/router/switch to which they connect.

> I noticed that they turn the kernel.hotplug in the network script!
> oldhotplug=`sysctl kernel.hotplug  2>/dev/null | \
> [..]
> After removing (commenting it out) that everything works for me!

I couldn't find this part in my scripts, they are probably different.
I can send them (privately?) in case you want to take a look and
are able to correct them. I expect there will be a lot of people with FC2 
installations, maybe the modified scripts could be put on prism54 site?

I also got a number of private replies from other people experiencing
the same problems.

However, I've NEARLY  solved the problems like this.
I've written this script:

#----- from here -----------------
WIRELESS=eth1
 
# the first line is VERY necessary
ifconfig $WIRELESS down
rmmod prism54
 
# setup wireless device
modprobe prism54
ifconfig $WIRELESS up
iwconfig $WIRELESS essid <secret>
iwconfig $WIRELESS key s:<secret>
iwconfig $WIRELESS sens -140
iwconfig $WIRELESS mode Managed
iwconfig $WIRELESS rate auto
iwconfig $WIRELESS rts auto
iwconfig $WIRELESS frag auto
iwconfig $WIRELESS commit
 
#obtain IP address
dhclient $WIRELESS
#----- to here -----------------
 
The reason for this script is that if you give two subsequential
"ifconfig eth# up" without a "ifconfig eth# down" between them,
the device (or the system?) messes up, I get the "can't load
firmware" stuff again, and I didn't find a way of recovering
other than reboot.  It's the same for all 3 PCs I have.  
And I believe that's the reason the standard scripts for
"service network start/restart/stop/etc" don't work.

There are still two big problems:

1) I can't put this script in rc.local, nor call it from
network start/restart/etc., because the device assignation
changes every boot (sometimes it is eth0 and other times
it is eth1).  I have to discover it by hand (modprobe prism 54;
iwconfig) and edit the script each time.

2) terrible performances. Even though iwconfig reports
bitrates between 24 and 36 Mbit/sec, the actual average
transfer rate that I get is around 20 KB/sec.
It seems the trasmission happens in little bursts
(a few milliseconds at the given speed, then 10-15 seconds
of pause)

More details: "ping" reports times of 1-2 ms between
the PCs in the LAN (seems normal).
If a machine goes out to the internet
(email, browsing, etc.) behaves mostly normal.
When I try to connect from one machine in the LAN
to another machine in the LAN, the transmission
happens as described above. Even a simple ssh connection
works like this: I enter the password, get the prompt
(or maybe wait 10 seconds). Then I write "ls -l",
wait 10 seconds, then the output comes alltogether
and pause other 10-15 seconds....

Is there a way to correct the problem?
Franco