[Prism54-users] loading firmware

[Hans Kramer]

On Wed, 2004-08-04 at 15:31, Franco wrote:
> 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.

Hi Franco,

See steve's e-mail where to find the "offending code." Of course you may
send me the scripts and I will edit them for you. I got FC1 running on
my Tecra 8100 and I tried it on my wife's Dell (whatever) on a test run
with FC2 (yeah she wanna use windoze).
I used a SMC2835. I noticed this little hick-up because I could bring up
the card with ifup eth0, but not with /etc/init.d/network start.
Well, at least it is worth trying!

Good luck.

Hans.




> > 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
> 
>