Problem(s) with a Compaq WL200

[Adrian McMenamin]

I've googled for an answer, but to no avail, even though I have had this 
problem with two different WL200 cards, so I assume it must be reasonably 
common.

I am using a 2.4.18 kernel with hostap_cs:

hostap_cs: hostap_cs.c 0.0.0 2002-05-19 (SSH Communications Security Corp, 
Jouni Malinen)

When the server boots the card appears to trip through ever lower tx bit rits 
due to retry errors and then settles for the lowest (1 Mb/s). Even then 
operation is poor (very poor) unless I set retry to zero - but there are 
still huge numbers of errors:

[root at electra /]# /usr/local/sbin/iwconfig
wlan0     IEEE 802.11-DS  ESSID:"Consume"
          Mode:Master  Frequency:2.412GHz  Access Point: 00:50:8B:46:C6:E5
          Bit Rate:1Mb/s   Tx-Power=20 dBm   Sensitivity=1/3
          Retry limit:0   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:87017  Invalid misc:1268   Missed beacon:0

ifconfig output...


wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:50:8B:46:C6:E5
          inet addr:192.168.63.64  Bcast:192.168.63.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:86454 errors:0 dropped:2 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:86964 errors:86788 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
          RX bytes:9945782 (9.4 Mb)  TX bytes:80421809 (76.6 Mb)
          Interrupt:9 Base address:0x100


Is this a known problem? Is there a fix?

Thanks in adavance

Adrian