[Aironet] Trouble with the current airo.c driver on multiple cards

[<mt...@pi...>]

I have been trying to convince the airo driver to behave with two Cisco
pci cards in the system. An older (zf?) driver + Redhat Linux kernel
2.2.14 was happy as a clam for several weeks when we decided that we
wanted two wireless lans (the one card would connect to a site 7 miles
away, the other to about 20 users within a quarter mile)... so, naturally,
we plunked a second card into the box, changed the init script to put one
card on another channel via "echo Channel: 4 >
/proc/aironet/eth1/Config"... 

and it actually worked

for about 10 minutes. Then the machine hung. And would hang on boot one
time in three at the driver initialization... whenever we could get the
machine to boot we'd try various combinations of echoing stuff to the
Config proc entry to no avail.

It turned out that that changing the channel failed kind of randomly -
sometimes you can echo a new channel to one device and have it work,
sometimes it doesn't work, sometimes it changes the other device...

......

ok, so maybe the machine was screwed up somehow. We got a newer machine,
plunked both cards in, neither worked. Aaggggh! Upgraded to the 2.2.17
kernel, put the latest and greatest driver on, and now they still didn't
work, and the interesting (I wrote the Config files to be the opposite of
the below)

cat eth0/Config                                            Mode: adhoc
Radio: on
NodeName: ROUTER04
PowerMode: CAM
DataRates: 130 4 11 22 0 0 0 0
Channel: 4
XmitPower: 30
LongRetryLimit: 16
ShortRetryLimit: 16
RTSThreshold: 2312
TXMSDULifetime: 5000
RXMSDULifetime: 10000
TXDiversity: left
RXDiversity: left
FragThreshold: 2312
WEP: open
Modulation: cck                                                                

cat eth1/Config                                            Mode: adhoc
Radio: on
NodeName: ROUTER05
PowerMode: CAM
DataRates: 130 4 11 22 0 0 0 0
Channel: 6
XmitPower: 30
LongRetryLimit: 16
ShortRetryLimit: 16
RTSThreshold: 2312
TXMSDULifetime: 5000
RXMSDULifetime: 10000
TXDiversity: left
RXDiversity: left
FragThreshold: 2312
WEP: open
Modulation: cck                                                                

OK... so finally, I ifdowned eth1 and eth0, rmmod'd the airo module, 
ifuped eth0 and wow, that connection worked! Then I ifuped the eth1
interface and that worked, too. So I put a sleep 30 command in the startup
script for the insmod of eth0, downed both interfaces and brought them up,
that *seemed* to work...

On boot, the machine hung at bringing up the interface. And everything
that I had just done didn't work....

Agggh! Has anyone else tried two aironet/cisco wireless cards in one
machine?

------
mike

"Coding is how I stay sane amidst the suites and journalists" - ESR