Wireless Network / WPA / ipw

[Fernan Aguero]

+----[ Wouter vanderPloeg <wouter1955 at gmail.com> (04.Feb.2007 19:44):
|
| regarding:
| 
| http://www.freebsdmall.com/~loader/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/wireless/article.html

Hi [ me jumping into the discussion ]

great article! it's a very welcome addition to the doc set.

I've been hesitating to install FreeBSD on my laptop cause 
I never found good enough documentation on how to set up 
the wireless card or if it would work at all ... now I'm
closer to wanting to try it out!

One thing that I (a newcomer to the wifi world) would look
for in the article is if my card is supported. I read that
"The most commonly used devices are those that use parts
made by Atheros." And an example about how to set up an
atheros driver follows. But what about other cards? Only the
"devices based on the Intersil Prism parts" are mentioned
other than the Atheros based ones.

I'm not asking to include one such example for every
other wireless card/driver. But perhaps a link to another
web page containing a reference of hardware that is
supported (and by which driver) or a pointer to a the
GENERIC kernel config or some other fake kernel config that
is more documented?

I've been reading the NOTES/GENERIC kernel config files
in my boxes (FreeBSD-6.2) and:

i) the NOTES file is useless as a reference for wireless stuff
i) the GENERIC kernel config is better:
device          wlan            # 802.11 support
device          wlan_wep        # 802.11 WEP support
device          wlan_ccmp       # 802.11 CCMP support
device          wlan_tkip       # 802.11 TKIP support
device          an              # Aironet 4500/4800 802.11 wireless NICs.
device          ath             # Atheros pci/cardbus NIC's
device          ath_hal         # Atheros HAL (Hardware Access Layer)
device          ath_rate_sample # SampleRate tx rate control for ath
device          awi             # BayStack 660 and others
device          ral             # Ralink Technology RT2500 wireless NICs.
device          wi              # WaveLAN/Intersil/Symbol 802.11 wireless NICs.
#device         wl              # Older non 802.11 Wavelan wireless NIC.

but there is no mention of the Intel Pro Wireless cards.
 
| there seems to be 2 problems with the WPA-PSK with the intel prowireless
| ipw2100
| 
| 1) NO AUTOMATIC CONNECTION
| # /etc/rc.d/netif start
| does NOT come up with a key (it says the AP does not come with an offer)

[snipped]

|
+----]

Mmm, so Wouter is talking about an ipw2100 on FreeBSD ... 
what device driver are you building into your kernel?

Where can I find more information about support for Intel
Pro Wireless cards in FreeBSD (for example the IPW 3945
abg)?

Fernan