Hi All,

I am using the newest version of the PHLAK distro installed onto my hard drive of an old Compaq Deskpro, and I would like to turn it into a wireless access point for my PowerBook G4 running MacOS 10.2.

Here is what I got for wireless hardware: The Deskpro has a SMC ISA PCMCIA Swap Box with a Lucent Wavelan Silver Turbo 11mbs 802.11b Wireless card with a recently updated firmware (ver 8.10). The PowerBook has an Apple Airport extreme card which supports both 802.11b and g.

For software, the PHLAK box seems to recognize the Wavelan card since one of the leds on it does turn on during boot. However, the PowerBook doesn't see it, so there must be somethings I need to do to turn it into a WAP. What software do I need and what settings do I need to change to make this work?

Thanks,
JS

BTW, here is what lsmod and iwconfig say:

$ lsmod
Module Size Used by Not tainted
nls_cp437 4348 1 (autoclean)
orinoco_cs 4468 0 (unused)
ds 6696 2 [orinoco_cs]
nbd 16388 0 (autoclean) (unused)
lp 7492 0 (autoclean)
parport 24064 0 (autoclean) [lp]
snd 28708 0
soundcore 3556 0 [snd]
aha1542 11248 0 (unused)
apm 10404 1
i82365 14404 2
pcmcia_core 43488 0 [orinoco_cs ds i82365]
usb-uhci 23276 0 (unused)
usbcore 61024 1 [usb-uhci]
tlan 27896 1
orinoco 33776 0 [orinoco_cs]
hermes 5472 0 [orinoco_cs orinoco]
nls_iso8859-1 2844 1
minix 19816 0 (unused)
hfs 81600 0 (unused)
efs 7592 0 (unused)
af_packet 14568 1
input 3296 0
rtc 7356 0 (autoclean)
unix 17064 29 (autoclean)

$ iwconfig
eth1 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"" Nickname:"HERMES I"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.422GHz Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
Bit Rate:11Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm Sensitivity:1/3
Retry limit:4 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off

Oh, also, here is a copy of my dmesg if anyone would like to look at it:

http://fire.prohosting.com/g1power/dmesg.txt

I am interested in doing something similar to what you are doing. The only way I know how to do that is to use the hostap driver, and I am not sure if PHLAK has included it in their latest version. Also, hostap supports the Intersil Prism cards and may not support your Lucent Wavelan. I am trying to use Knoppix on a live CD to turn a prism card into an AP, but am having problems changing drivers.

Hi level,

Thanks for the advice! I'll have to look into the hostap driver. However, I am not sure I need it since PHLAK seems to recognize the card and applies the orinoco (includes wavelan) driver during the boot. What I think I need to know is how to configure it into a WAP. If you or anyone else have any info on that, please let me know.

Thanks,
JS

I don't think you can use such a setup as a true access point.

You are going to have to switch the cards to Ad-Hoc mode. This way they will communicate directly, and not need an access point.

Hi MS3FGX,

Thanks for the info! However, do you know how I would set my Wavelan card to Ad-hoc mode?

Also, I was able to find some info on setting up the card under NetBSD (especially setting it up as IBSS mode): http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/...k/wavelan.html

According to this doc, could I set up the card in IBSS under PHLAK? And, if so, how would the commands differ?

Thanks again,
JS