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May 27, 2005
Updating the IPW2200 Driver & Firmware
Version 1.0.4 of the open source IPW2200 driver, which supports Intel's IPW2200 802.11b/g & IPW2915 802.11a/b/g cards was released.
This driver is fairly easy to install and use.
Before going over the steps needed to get these cards working, I should tell you that I have only done this on Fedora Core. These instructions should work unmodified for RHEL3, RHEL4 and any distributions derived from Red Hat, but I can not guarantee that you will not need to tweak this a little bit. In other words, "Your Mileage May Vary."
With that out of the way, let's get into the setup.
Download the driver and firmware files
It is important to read through the information related to each new release of this driver. These cards do not have their firmware stored on-board; it is loaded into the card by the driver when it starts up.I did not pay sufficiently close attention when I downloaded the 1.0.4 driver. I have been running 1.0.3 since I installed the IPW2915 in my notebook. For the 1.0.4 release, updated firmware must be installed. I failed to notice that requirement and had to go get the files using another computer (thanks to Evan for the use of his notebook for this) and place them on a USB KeyChain Drive. The ipw2200 1.0.4 driver will not work without the corresponding updated (version 2.3) firmware files.
Extract the Source Code & Firmware Files
After downloading all the needed files, extract the tarballs in a working directory. Some people prefer to use /tmp/ for such things. I like to use my ~/src/ directory. Whereever you choose to extract the tarballs, these commands will do the trick:$ cd ~/src/ $ tar -zxf /path/to/downloaded/files/ipw2200-1.0.4.tgz $ mkdir ipw2200-fw-2.3
A Little Housekeeping
Although the code is ready to be built, there are a couple of housecleaning chores to take care of, first. As root (I prefer to use a separate shell, so I can just bounce back an forth between the non-priviledged user shell and root, only running commands as root that absolutely have to be), go into the wireless network driver modules directory for the currently running kernel:# cd /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/
Delete the existing IPW2200 and 80211 files & directories.
# rm -R 80211* ipw2200*
These files must be eradicated in order for the new driver to work.
Build the Driver
Return to the unprivileged user shell, change into the driver source code directory and build the driver:$ cd ipw2200-1.0.4 $ make
Install the Driver
After the build completes, use the root shell to install the driver:# cd ~username/src/ipw2200-1.0.4 # make install
Make the Firmware Files Available to the Driver
Before trying to load the driver, you have to place the firmware files in the proper directory so the driver can find and load them. Remove any old firmware files, if present, as well:# rm /lib/firmware/ipw*fw # cd ../ipw220-fw-2.3 # cp ipw*fw /lib/firmware/
Use the New Driver
That's it. The updated ipw2200 driver is now ready to function. If you were already running an older version of the driver, unload it first, then load the new driver. Here is the way I prefer to do it:# rmmod ipw2200 # ifup eth1
The new driver is now in use. Enjoy!
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Lamont R. Peterson
Posted by lamontp at 12:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 25, 2005
802.11a Configuration Woes ... with Solution
Today, I tried to bring up the 802.11a connection here at Guru Labs. It failed. Although my previous configuration had been working, something had changed and the configuration "trick" I had come up with was not robust enough to deal with it.
After playing around with the configuration, I was able to get it working by commenting out the CHANNEL variable in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1-work file. Then, using iwpriv as I had previously I would bring up the interface, associate with the 802.11a access point (AP) and configure the interface using DHCP.
The search was on for a better way to configure the system to prefer 802.11a over either 'b' or 'g' in the ifcfg-eth1-work file.
The solution was really quite simple; add this line to the appropriate ifcfg-* configuration file(s) in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ directory:
IWPRIV="set_mode 7"
In the case of my Intel IPW2915 wireless Mini-PCI NIC, this value places the card in "802.11abg" mode, which tries to find an 802.11a connection before trying 802.11g and, finally, 802.11b. Other NICs may not use the same parameters, but whatever it is that needs to be passed to the IWPRIV command can be placed in that variable and it will be used before trying to associate to an AP.
In my case, the access point had been reboot and, apparently, had decided to use a different channel, which is why my first stab at persistently configuring 802.11a support failed.
Thanks go to Dax for pointing out that the ifup-wireless script could utilize the IWPRIV variable in the ifcfg-* files.
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Lamont R. Peterson
Posted by lamontp at 4:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 24, 2005
On the Road, Again...
It's been a little more than two months, but I've finally got my first road trip of the 2005 training season.
It seams that we have a lull in the (travel) action each year around February-April. This year, we were rather busy just into March and made it most of the way through May before the trips started up again.
On May 15, I boarded a flight to Hartford, Connecticut via Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota. Evan was also traveling; to Minneapolis. I tried to phone him and see if he was going to be on my flight while I was in the Salt Lake City Airport, but never got through to him. Yesterday (the first back in the office after this trip), I found out he had been stranded and could not get out to Minneapolis until Monday afternoon. Kinda funny, eh?
This was my first time in Connecticut or, for that matter, New England.
The classroom was in Glastonbury, Connecticut. It was the first of two GL510 courses (Derek is there this week, teaching the second one). All the students for both sittings came from one company.
The training center provides a lot of training. Their systems are all Sun Microsystems SPARC workstations. Because of this, they rented some IBM T23 ThinkPad notebooks. There were some small issues with getting the classroom setup, a couple of bad hard drives in the notebooks and one with some bad memory, but overall, it was the smoothest setup with rented equipment I have had. Derek was quite happy that I fixed everything for him.
The students were one of the most fun bunches of guys (no women, this time) I have had the privilege to teach. They were on the ball, had the competence to really follow along with where we were heading and asked some great questions.
In summation, I can not think of a much better way to start the traiing season.
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Lamont R. Peterson
Posted by lamontp at 2:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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 11:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack