[Wirelessdriver-support] Re: Wirelessdriver-support digest, Vol 1 #449 - 1 msg

[Amanda W. <am...@al...>]

wir...@li... wrote:
> 1. I just bought a Proxim Orinoco Gold card for my 400 MHz TiBook.  As
> other people have reported, it is not recognized by WirelessDriver.  In
> part, this is because during Orinoco's switch from Lucent to Proxim,
> the IOName of the card switched from "pccard156,2" to "pccard156,3".

There are more differences than the MANFID.  The latest round of 
Orinoco cards are based on the HERMES 2.0 controller, which is not 
compatible with drivers for previous versions of HERMES.  They will not 
work with either the WirelessDriver or the IOXperts driver.

> 2. I am fortunate to have access to a Lucent Orinoco card as well for
> testing purposes, and that card, having the IOName "pccard156,2", gets
> its MAC address read properly.  Unfortunately, my department has its
> Airport network set up in 40-bit encryption mode, and it appears that
> only 128-bit encryption is supported for the Orinoco Gold card.

The card itself should work fine with either 40-bit or 128-bit WEP.  
This may be a WirelessDriver limitation, but is not a hardware problem.

> That being said, both of my cards are
> able to take the Airport password and retrieve the proper hex-code.  My
> understanding is that this means that the card is able to communicate
> with the base station and retrieve this information.

No.  The transformation of the password to a hex code is done on your 
Mac, not on the base station.

> I hope to get answers soon so that I'm not forced to plunk down the $20
> for the ioxperts driver.

The IOXperts driver won't help you with the newer card (as I noted 
above, it breaks for everyone), but it would allow you to use 40-bit 
WEP on the older Gold card.  You can test it out to confirm this 
without having to plunk down any money.


Amanda Walker
(disclaimer: I wrote the IOXperts driver)