Problem with using an Apple Airport Express

[George N. White III]

On Nov 29, 2007 8:53 PM, Leslie Katz <lesliek at ozemail.com.au> wrote:

> Many thanks for your reply Dan.
>
> The wireless card in the laptop is a Netgear WG511v2. The distribution
> on the laptop is Damn Small Linux v 4, chosen because of the laptop's
> age. To get the card to work, I use the Windows (XP? I'm sorry, I don't
> remember) driver supplied with the card and the version of ndiswrapper
> that comes as part of DSL v 4.

I've been using ndiswrapper with a USB wireless dongle for a couple
years under RH Fedora -- as the kernels are updated I've had to
get newer versions of ndiswrapper.   I have a couple different dongles,
and the drivers appear to differ in the stack requirement.  The one I
use works reliably with RH 4k stacks.

I also tried ndiswrapper n a recent Knoppix, but couldn't get
it to work at all.

I'm using an SMC router, and and see similar behaviour -- generally
the initial connection is good, sometimes last days, but once the
connection is lost it can be tricky to get it back.   Careful adjustment
of the antenna position on the router and the location of the dongle
seems important, but the PC is 2 floors above the router.  The most
reliable way to get the connection back seems to be "rmmod
ndsiwrapper; modprobe ndiswrapper" then run iwlist scan a few times
until the right AP appears on the list.

> I understand what you say about leaving wpa_supplicant alone, because
> I've run it in debug mode and seen that it keeps rescanning. I hadn't
> realised, though, that if I didn't see the Airport Express at first,
> even though it was switched on, it might still show up in a later scan.
> I had assumed that the only way in which the first scan result would
> change later would be if an access point in range was switched on or off.
>
> As to the driver's part in the process, obviously the driver does work
> at least sometimes. I seem to remember that there were various
> parameters one could set when loading the ndiswrapper module, but I've
> forgotten all about them, thinking with relief that, once I got the
> module to load, that was the end of that stage of the quest. Would going
> back to that stage and setting some parameters when loading ndiswrapper
> increase my chances of getting the card to connect to the Airport Express?

I don't recall any parameters other than the name of the interface.  What
does "modinfo ndiswrapper" offer?

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia