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Date:      Wed, 30 Aug 2000 17:55:42 -0400
From:      "Jim Flowers" <jflowers@ezo.net>
To:        "Atsushi Onoe" <onoe@sm.sony.co.jp>
Cc:        <freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>, <freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: fbsd box acting as a wavelan BS (Yes it can)
Message-ID:  <002101c012cd$0b4a53b0$81d396ce@ezo.net>
References:  <39A9E49D.A79BF6FD@softweyr.com> <200008280703.e7S732S01248@duplo.sm.sony.co.jp>

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The 6.04 firmware does, indeed, allow establishing a network with an ISA
card in a FreeBSD box, however, when doing the PCCard upgrade with a Windows
machine it requires the drivers to be upgraded to 4.01 first and if you want
to talk to it with the IEEE/Wave Manager Client update it, as well.
Everything seems to be backward compatible (ad-hoc, Infrastructure,
WaveManageer/Client, Manager.

The good news is that it works farily well and will setup a network netname,
with the procedure you indicated.  You can also move away from the default
frequency in either direction and the remote stations will follow it so the
beacons must work.  Works with multiple clients (simultaneously) but the
cache (-C) only reports levels on a single remote.  Haven't tried multiple
throughput tests yet.  Statistics (-o) don't show any values but these are
on 4.1-STABLE #0 and maybe that is the same problem reported by Theo
Pagtzis.

The bad news is that the unit is not really running as an infrastructure
network and is reported by the WaveManager Client as a "public ad-hoc
workgroup" with the specified netname.  I don't mind so much that the site
monitor doesn't work (the link tests do work) but it's really a downer that,
being identified as an ad-hoc network type, the max transmit rate is locked
at 2 Mbps which limits TCP throughput to about 1.2 - 1.5 Mbps in both
directions with turbo bronze cards.

Sure would be great if someone could find a way around that but I don't hold
out much hope for a simple driver modification after reading Bill Paul's
driver comments.  Looks like Lucent is intent on restricting the third-party
functionality to avoid eating their children.  Still, it can make a nice
distribution point sitting out at the end of a single T-1 and we've got lots
of 2 Mb cards.

After looking through the Lucent driver for Linux, I see that they don't
even have that much.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Atsushi Onoe" <onoe@sm.sony.co.jp>
To: <wes@softweyr.com>
Cc: <jflowers@peony.ezo.net>; <T.Pagtzis@cs.ucl.ac.uk>; <eric@svjava.com>;
<freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>; <freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG>
Sent: Monday, August 28, 2000 3:03 AM
Subject: Re: fbsd box acting as a wavelan BS


> > > Last I checked the wi driver will not do IBSS and says so in the
> > > documentation.  I also tried it and couldn't get anywhere.  Would be
nice.
> >
> > Uh, er, if you mean to create a service set, Lucent apparently hasn't
seen
> > fit to release that sort of information about the cards yet.  I can
probably
> > get access to it, but it would be under NDA and therefore not useful.
Your
> > best bet is to bug your friendly neighborhood Lucent rep into releaseing
> > the full documentation (and sample source code) to Bill Paul.
>
> Lucent have shipped newer firmware this March which DOES support creating
> IBSS.  The verision 6.04 of the firmware creates IBSS by setting wicontrol
> -c 1 with -p 1 (BSS mode), and joins to IBSS if no access points found.
> It seems that the name of created IBSS follows "network name" specified by
> -n option, not "SSID" by -q option.
>
> Regards,
>
> Atsushi Onoe
>



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