DWL-650P Automatic Firmware Download

[Pavel Roskin]

On Mon, 8 Mar 2004, Andrew Barr wrote:

> Maybe someone can help me out here: I am trying to get the firmware to
> download into my DWL-650P automatically upon either bootup or insertion
> of the card. To do this, I've added these two lines to
> /etc/modules.conf:
>
> alias wlan0 hostap_cs
> post-install hostap_cs /usr/sbin/hostap_fw_load wlan0

That's a wrong approach.  If you have two cards, the module will be
inserted only once.  If the module is already loaded or compiled into the
kernel, the post-install will never happen.

Also, the interface is registered after the module is inserted and the
card is bound to the driver.  post-install is run immediately after the
module is inserted, i.e. before the interface is registered.

The right approach is to use hotplug.  The net events are generated when
an interface is registered.  Red Hat would call /sbin/ifup, which should
have hooks to implement specific commands for certain cards.  Other
distributions should use a similar setup.

You may want to read file HOTPLUG.txt from
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/wireless_tools.27.pre15.tar.gz
but it's work in progress.

Also, linux-wlan-ng comes with hotplug support, but AVS, being true to its
style, came with separate wlan.agent script, which is probably not the
most elegant solution compared to using net.agent.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin