Need help programming a prism card

[Jouni Malinen]

On Mon, Dec 18, 2006 at 04:04:39PM -0500, jbarnett at coleinnovations.com wrote:

> Iv'e been working on this problem for some time now, and I am in need
> for some much needed help. Let me first describe what I am trying to
> accomplish, I current have a Intersil PRISM 2 (802.11b) PCMCIA wireless
> card; the card has three LEDs on the top part of the card. One of these
> LEDs is the power LED, which lights green when the card is turned on.

Do you have any more detail model number/vendor information for this
card?

> The PRISM 2 wireless card came with the old linux-wlan-ng 2.0 drivers;
> very out of date, and it also came with a tiny piece of software. This
> piece of software has a couple of functions that are used to control
> the wireless card; but the main function that I am interested in, is
> the function that turns the card on, called "cardon". When I properly
> configure the card using the linux-wlan-ng tools, and then run,
> "./cardon wlan0". The power LED light turns green, and I then run
> "tcpdump -x -X -s 2346 -vvv -i wlan0", which displays the expected
> results to standard out.

Hmm.. Is that linux-wlan-ng driver just a standard driver or do you know
whether it has been modified for this specific card? Are there some
specific hardware changes (like radio on/off switch etc.) here?

> My goal is to make this card work with the hostap-driver-0.4.9; which
> is the newest drivers for the PRISM chipset.

If the card is a standard Prism2/2.5/3 card, it should work as-is..

> Now, when I insert the PRISM 2 wireless card into my PCMCIA slot, with
> the hostAP drivers, the lights on the card flash; twice, then they go
> blank. Now when I go and run "./cardon wlan0" the card should turn on,
> but it doesn't because the "cardon" program is meant to communicate
> with the linux-wlan-ng drivers; not the hostAP drivers.

cardon command sounds like something that is just not going to work with
Host AP driver. Anyway, could could you please send 'dmesg' output
showing the kernel debug messages after the card is inserted?

> will work with the hostAP driver. I beleive I am using the correct
> value for the second aurgument to the ioctl call. I am not very good at

To which ioctl call?

> cmd: 24 = 0x11
> param0:  0 = 0x00
> param1:  0 = 0x00
> param2:  0 = 0x00
> response0:  0 = 0x00
> response1:  0 = 0x00
> response2: 24 = 0x11
> status:     1 = 0x01
> 
> 
> The incorrect values for comm_t are ..

This is some linux-wlan-ng specific structure and there is not much
point in trying to use that with Host AP driver.. Do you know what
exactly this cardon command is trying to do as far as the Prism2 card is
concerned?

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA