Tag Archives: wireless

Forgetting why you replaced hardware

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A month or so with nothing to say is not really what’s been going on, lets try to get caught up. Over the Christmas / New Year holiday I decided to move my Fetchmail/Dovecot/LDAP installation to a different machine. Now the machine I had in mind I retired back in March of 08 after having some problems when adding memory. For what I remember it was two of the three DIMM slots were bad. So when it booted fine and loaded Lenny without a hitch I figured we’re good since I didn’t intend to add any memory. Not so.

The point of the move was that box had a mobo with a small form factor their was no room for expansion and I didn’t want to do it with USB. So after getting everything moved adding Squirrelmail, Spamassassin, and Procmail I was ready to tackle the wireless card and firewall rules. That’s when I was reminded why I replaced the box in the first place.

The wireless card worked under Ubuntu and used the MadWifi drivers so getting the same result with Lenny wasn’t going to be a big deal. Unfortunately I could never get the system to boot with the wireless card in it would just stop pre-post with a long beep. That is a memory issue but when pulling the wireless card out and reseeding the memory no problems. Sigh …

So I was stuck. I suppose I could stay with wired but that would bring other challenges into play that I’ve long since put behind me with wireless. In hindsight it was not the best project to start but it was nice to go through the motion. I think the moral here for me is older hardware is good for somethings but if you’ve once diagnosed a problem don’t go back to it …. let it be !!!

Go’in all wireless

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Ever since the move I’ve debated about bringing cable into the office. This past weekend I decided it was time to do something about it. After checking the outlet in the bedroom, it was split with cable running on the floor, it did not come from the attic. That pretty much told me I needed to go wireless.

Yes I did not want to split, run up the wall and through the attic then back down to the other side.

Linksys WRT300N

So it was off to Curcuit City for a new router with wireless and a wireless PCI for the work PC. An important less I forgot here was do some research first before these kinds of purchases it can save you time and money.

The selections to choose from were Linksys, D-Link, Netgear and Belkin.

My current router is a Netgear MR314, it has served me well for the last 5 year but I figured if I was going wireless on the work PC I should be current. I decided on Linksys’s WRT300N and their WMP300N PCI card. I would later learn one of those choices was not the best. I was able to move the cable modem, router and the test server out of the office which was another reason for going wireless. Setup was quick and initial tests with VPN into the office were good.

Linksys PCI WMP300N

But then, after about 5 minutes, the PC froze. A hard reset was the only choice and after coming back up it repeated. The uptime would vary between 5 to 15 minutes depending on internet usage. Like I said do some research first cause a quick google took me to the Linksys forums and problems with the WMP300N. No need to go into all the specifics but a driver problem with the Broadcom chipset seems to be the root of it and no update from Linksys at this point in time. So back to the store for another card and we are up and running, no freezes. Signal strength is not as good as the Linksys, as the external antenna of the WMP300N does help, but after a full day of using it I don’t see a difference from wired.

ipw2200 firmware problems with kernel 2.6.10 and 2.6.12

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After a few days without wireless figured I’d get down to trying to fix it. I’m not sure what happened with the kernel updates for 2.6.10.x and 2.6.12.x but I kept getting firmware errors in the dmesg log.

[4295079.175000] ipw2200: Firmware error detected.  Restarting.
[4295082.861000] ipw2200: Firmware error detected.  Restarting.
[4295086.139000] ipw2200: Firmware error detected.  Restarting.

I went to ipw2200.sourceforge.net to veify I had the latest version and to double check the configuration. So I grabbed the firmware for the version I was using and unzipped it to /lib/hotplug/firmware.

So far so good, wireless is back working and no more firmware errors in the dmesg log.