MA401 & hostAP trouble

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt]

Hi !

I'm experimenting on a ppc405-based embedded platform using an
a NetGeat MA401 card in an MA301 PCI adapter with the hostap
driver.

The card has a NIC id 0x800c, v1.0.0, PRI id 0x15 v1.0.7 and STA
id 0x1f v1.3.6 (though the firmware on the CDROM provided by
Netgear is only 1.3.4). I've tried updating it to 1.4.9 using
the firmware previously posted on this list, but it would
complain that firmware wasn't built for 0x800c.

My problem is quite simple: behaviour is erratic. I may be
missing something though so I would appreciate any help in
troubleshooting that..

I don't do any special setting after loading the hostap
driver (still at 2002-09-12 for now). I just up the interface
with some non routed IP, eventually set it's essid, and set
the channel to 10 (as I'm testing with an Apple airport card
bought in France, and thus limited to channel 10 and possibly
above).

The result is that it takes a very long time for the airport
card (which is an orinoco silver with firmware 8.70) to actually
see a link to the AP.  By very long I mean a random amount of
time that goes up to a couple of minutes (when they ever get a
link). The 2 cards are located less than 1 meter away.
Then, if I ping the AP machine from the airport, or setup some
routing, things usually just fail most of the time, that is most
packets are dropped (though some go through). Usually not enough
to establish a TCP connexion.

The AP machine keeps displaying in dmesg messages of the kind
"wlan0: <airport MAC addr> auth (alg=0 trans#=1 stat=0 len=6fc=08b0) => 0
(authenticated)
and some messages about lowering down Tx rate (too 55, then 20, then 10)

Any clue ? Should I try to find a newer firmware ? Is there
something else wrong ?

Regards, and thanks in advance for any help !

Ben.
Linux/PPC kernel bot