« Unexpected Adventure | Main | On the Road, Again... »
May 4, 2005
802.11a is Mine
On Friday (April 29, 2005), a shipment arrived at the office for me. It was my new Intel IPW2915 Mini-PCI 802.11a/b/g card. It took only a couple of minutes to remove the old IPW2100 card and replace it with the new one. Now, my Dell Inspiron 4150 is the only system at Guru Labs that has 802.11a support.
After Dax provided me with the files needed to bring the 2915 online (it uses the same driver and firmware files that the IPW2200 he has in his notebook does), I was able to bring up the new NIC and start connecting to wireless networks. However, it defaulted to the 802.11g connection over the 802.11a after I set up the configuration file (/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 on Fedora Core 3.
After using the iwpriv command to set the card to use 802.11a, I began looking for a directive I could add to my /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1-work file which would cause the NIC to be brought up on the 802.11a when I configured the connection using ifup.
The iwconfig command reported that channel 149 was being used when the NIC was on 802.11a, so I decided to try setting that value in the configuration file. It worked. Now, I simply run "ifup eth1-work" and I associate with the 802.11a access point here at Guru Labs. The bandwidth is great; typically better than 802.11g. It's good to be the king ;).
Lamont R. Peterson
Posted by lamontp at May 4, 2005 11:44 AM