What Cf Cards Work With Wpa?

[Prefect47]

Haven't been using my C860 for some time (except to watch TV shows and movies when I'm travelling) but since access points have popped up around my little town, not to mention at work, I got interested again.

Since I use wireless at home with WPA-PSK, I'd like to know if there are any CF cards that have confirmed support for it. I've read that WPA support is a driver issue but there seems to be some confusion wether it still needs some form of support from the cards hardware/firmware.

Been reading the forums and checking card specs for three hours now without getting that much closer to an answer to this...  

BTW, I'm also planning on changing to OZ on my C860 Real Soon Now ™, will that complicate things wrt wifi/wpa support?

[Hrw]

iirc all Prism based wifi cards works with WPA - you need to check firmware version (have to be 1.7.0 atleast)

[speculatrix]

I'm told you need to use hostap driver...

We have an apple airport extreme at work, so I want to get WPA to work.

I've got two wlan cards, the symbol/socket one which is prism based and causes Z to load the prism drivers. It doesn't work with wpa, probably because I don't know the voodoo magic to get it to load hostap and not prism.

The other card is the mercury/zonet zcf110 which causes my Z to load the hostap driver. It doesn't work either,  but the WPA supplicant does fire up, and tries to talk to the airport, but no joy.

I gave up and bought a bluetooth dongle for use at work, and use my desktop suse93 machine as a gateway. It worked first time. Apart from oddities with bluetooth, but that's another story!

[speculatrix]

can anyone tell me how I can make my cacko 860 load the hostap driver when I plug in my prism (socket/symbol) card, so that wpa will work? It currently loads the prism driver which I'm told doesn't support wpa.

I'm told that wpa won't work on my mercury/zonet zcf1100 card - certainly my experience agrees.

[Hrw]

speculatrix: install OZ, insert card, configure & run wpa_supplicant

if it does not work then check firmware of card - 1.7.0 or 1.7.4 is needed. To update firmware you need hostap driver (with firmware loading enabled) and hostap-utils.

[arniel]

speculatrix: install OZ, insert card, configure & run wpa_supplicant

if it does not work then check firmware of card - 1.7.0 or 1.7.4 is needed. To update firmware you need hostap driver (with firmware loading enabled) and hostap-utils.
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If you're going to answer a question, it is customary to attempt to make the answer useful!  Do you work for Micro$oft?  

I am no Z expert, but can I suggest you look in the file /etc/pcmcia/config for the entry matching your card, then edit the line underneath starting "bind" to replace whatever is there with "hostap_cs".  Reboot and see if that works.

As for finding a hostap driver with firmware loading enabled, I'm sorry but I can't answer that question.
Maybe someone with more knowledge than myself will be able to tell you HOW to configure and run wpa_supplicant and where to get the appropriate hostap driver (if the standard one doesn't already have that facility) and firmware from.

HTH.

[speculatrix]

** HRW
hmm, install OZ. I assume from your answer that hostap-utils is not available for cacko/sharp rom?

I've been considering trying OZ... when the new release is stable I might.

Where do I get the updated firmware for the socket/symbol wlan card from please? How do I *know* that I need to update the firmware, is there a way of finding out from the card?

** arniel
thanks for the answer, I will give that a go.

Paul

[Hrw]

** HRW
hmm, install OZ. I assume from your answer that hostap-utils is not available for cacko/sharp rom?

Don't know - never used Cacko - I know that this is working under OZ.

Where do I get the updated firmware for the socket/symbol wlan card from please? How do I *know* that I need to update the firmware, is there a way of finding out from the card?

http://linux.junsun.net/intersil-prism/ - Mini-howto on Flashing Intersil Prism Chipsets
http://www.red-bean.com/~proski/firmware/ - firmware collection

Firmware infos:
1.4.9 - Earlier version (1.4.2?) has some problems with PCI-based cards. The symptom is corrupted packets. If you have PCI cards, upgrade to this one.
1.5.6 - This version and later ones enable hostap driver to use standard 4-address packet format for WDS packets.
1.7.0 - minimal version to get WPA working
1.7.4 - No negative reports about this version so far. One report says 1.7.4 supports hiding ESSID.

[speculatrix]

that is very helpful, thanks. I have now downloaded the firmwares and verified that cacko has the hostap-utils, so in theory I just need to change the bindings to make Z use hostap and not prism driver, and I can reflash.

news will follow.

thanks very much.

[Hrw]

http://www.hrw.one.pl/2005/10/27/prism-firmware-features/

[Prefect47]

Been searching high and low for someone/somewhere (preferrably in Sweden) that sells the Socket Low Power / Spectrum24 / Symbol Wireless Networker CF WLAN card. The only one I've found is eXpansys, and they only deliver directly to you during the day which is a hassle if you're at work more than 1h distance from home...

BTW, are all those really different names on the same card? And the orange one is revB, right? As in "not recommended"?

[Cagilaba]

Does anyone know if the Linksys WCF12 can be made to work with WPA? I *think* the firmware version on my card is 1.4.2 which it seems from this discussion doesn't support WPA.

Is there a way to upgrade the firmware on this card?

[Hrw]

You need atleast 1.7.0 firmware. How to update was discussed already - search in my posts.

[speculatrix]

hmm. well, I couldn't get cacko (1.22) to flash new firmware, so I got a CF-PCMCIA adaptor and tried using my SuSE9.3 laptop. I reconfigured it to use the hostap driver for the card, as per HRW's instructions that reflashing isn't possible otherwise. Here's what I got:

Nov  8 22:59:49 fry cardmgr[4040]: socket 1: Spectrum24 LA4100 Series WLAN PC Card
Nov  8 22:59:50 fry kernel: hostap: module not supported by Novell, setting U taint flag.
Nov  8 22:59:50 fry kernel: hostap_crypt: registered algorithm 'NULL'
Nov  8 22:59:50 fry kernel: hostap_cs: module not supported by Novell, setting U taint flag.
Nov  8 22:59:50 fry kernel: hostap_cs: 0.4.4 - 2005-08-21 (Jouni Malinen <jkmaline@cc.hut.fi>)
Nov  8 22:59:50 fry kernel: hostap_cs: setting Vcc=33 (constant)
Nov  8 22:59:50 fry kernel: hostap_cs: CS_EVENT_CARD_INSERTION
Nov  8 22:59:50 fry kernel: hostap_cs: setting Vcc=33 (from config)
Nov  8 22:59:50 fry kernel: Checking CFTABLE_ENTRY 0x01 (default 0x01)
Nov  8 22:59:50 fry kernel: IO window settings: cfg->io.nwin=1 dflt.io.nwin=1
Nov  8 22:59:50 fry kernel: io->flags = 0x00C7, io.base=0x0000, len=72
Nov  8 22:59:50 fry kernel: hostap_cs: Registered netdevice wifi0
Nov  8 22:59:50 fry kernel: hostap_cs: index 0x01: Vcc 3.3, irq 3, io 0xe080-0xe0c7
Nov  8 22:59:51 fry kernel: hostap_cs: assuming no Primary image in flash - card initialization not completed
Nov  8 22:59:51 fry kernel: wifi0: test Genesis mode with HCR 0x1f
Nov  8 22:59:51 fry kernel: prism2_pccard_cor_sreset: original COR 41
Nov  8 22:59:51 fry kernel: prism2_pccard_genesis_sreset: original COR 41
Nov  8 22:59:51 fry kernel: Readback test failed, HCR 0x1f write 00 e1 a1 ff read 00 ce a1 ce
Nov  8 22:59:51 fry kernel: wifi0: test Genesis mode with HCR 0x0f
Nov  8 22:59:51 fry kernel: prism2_pccard_cor_sreset: original COR 41
Nov  8 22:59:51 fry kernel: prism2_pccard_genesis_sreset: original COR 41
Nov  8 22:59:51 fry kernel: Readback test succeeded, HCR 0x0f
Nov  8 22:59:51 fry kernel: prism2_pccard_genesis_sreset: original COR 41
Nov  8 22:59:51 fry kernel: wifi0: registered netdevice wlan0
Nov  8 22:59:51 fry kernel: wifi0: cannot get RID fdc6 (len=12) - no PRI f/w

the final line simply repeats indefinitely, sometimes saying wifi0, sometimes wlan0.

I also tried a windows reflash utility but it didn't find the card, although Windows was happy to try and use the card.

So, after much googling I found that, according to the Jean Tourrilhes page, the symbol CF wlan card doesn't have any built-in firmware, the host uploads the firmware into the card during initialisation.
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourri...html#SpectrumCF

I am now puzzled. Or maybe I misunderstood you HRW... is it that OpenZaurus is set up to use the card in hostap mode, and uploads the firmware to the card using the prism2_srec function during boot, and you're not actually upgrading the card at all?

thanks
Paul

[Hrw]

"Spectrum24 LA4100 Series WLAN PC Card" is not prism but spectrum based card. I was talking about prism based cards which use hostap_cs driver.

Code: [Select]

card "LA4100 Spectrum24 CF WLAN Card"
  manfid 0x026c, 0x0001
  bind "spectrum_cs"