[MLB-WIRELESS] FreeBSD and Wireless 802.11b

[paul van den bergen]

Hi all,

As you may be aware I am setting up (er. attempting to set up) a wireless 
network test bed at Swinburne.  We have a fairly good idea of what we want to 
end up doing and how to do it, but I have some issues I need a hand with.

OK, I have two main areas to address.

OS is FreeBSD. this is fairly fixed for historical and prejudicial reasons.

1) hardware setup - 
	hardware compatability between PCI-bridges, motherboards, wireless pccards 
and LAN cards/other cards.

2) IPv6  - setting it up on the testbed network and tunnelling to other IPv6 
networks....


As you can see, the above are not dissimilar to some of the issues that have 
cropped up on this forum.  What I need right now is help with the first item. 
Specifically I am trying to achieve 2 things.

firstly I want to get the machines I have working with the equipment I have 
right now.

secondly I want to make a choice about what hardware to recommend that we 
purchase here to allow us the best chance of a trouble free test bed.

People who have set up wireless cards on FreeBSD based machines, can you share 
your experiences with me, especially if you have had problems.  I am 
interested in what chip sets combinations you are using (mother board, 
pccard, pci bridge especially)

To kick things off, this is what I have encountered so far.

Machine 1:

EPIA (rev B) MB - via VT8231 chip set, small form factor (~150 mm square)

ex skynet global wireless card - Enterasys CSIBD-AB high rate 40 bit WEP

PCI cradle - Ricoh RL5C475 PCI-CardBus Bridge - as sold by Matt Chipman (and 
me early on) on the TIB, ID'd as Communication Automation Corporation using 
'pciconf -lv'

Problems encountered: (resolved):
pccard ID'd and installed with no problems. BUT, wi0 interface not brought up 
on start up or on card insert.
error message to the effect that the card was not found in the database:
Web search found this to be a pccard_mem problem, detailed in 'man pccardc' 
and corrected by setting pccard_mem="0xd8000" in /etc/rc.conf
wi0 now works beautifully in this machine.

Machine 2:
compaq evo - MB unknown (no obviuos markings), chipset intel FW82801BA

same wireless card and PCI bridge as above

Problems encountered: (unresolved):
same error conditions as above.  BUT changing pccard_mam to any of the 4 
available slots does not correct the problem.

suspect it is an IRQ or PCI space clash,. but this is just a guess at teh 
moment.

chain of devices
pcib0 -> pci0 -> (uhci0,1,atapci0,isab0,pcib1 and )pcib2->pci2->(fxp0, vr0 and 
pcic0)

fxp0 - Intel Pro/100 Ethernet
vr0 (VIA VT6102 Rhine II 10/100BaseTX) -> miibus0 (MII bus) -> ukphy0 (Generic 
IEEE 802.3u media inerface)
pcic0 (Ricoh RL5C475 PCI-CardBus Bridge) -> pccard0 (PC card 16-bit bus 
(classic)

as you can see there are 3 ethernet devices hanging off the one PCI bus.  2 of 
these share irq 10 or 11 (or 5? - I believe I can force this in Bios)

on the other machine the irq was 5 (IIRC) and the memory range looked OK for 
that. Is it posible that the pccard0 needs to be on irq 5 for the memory 
ranges available in pccard driver to work?  Is there a utility available in 
BSD land that will allow me to look at the DMA, IRQ,PCI and memory settings 
of my machine in a way that allows me to make an intelligent decsion about 
what settings to use? (I can use pccardc or pccardd flags to set these values 
if I just know what they are...)













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