0.7.5 to 1.4.9 firmware upgrade??

Jouni Malinen jkmaline at cc.hut.fi
Tue Oct 15 04:23:36 EDT 2002


On Mon, Oct 14, 2002 at 06:04:10PM -0300, Bruno Lopes F. Cabral wrote:

> I'd like to know if it is possible/recommended to upgrade 
> them to a newer firmware (i.e. 1.4.9) or it would be 
> better to stick with the one it has now. 

If it isn't broken, why fix it.. I haven't seen 1.4.9 f/w for old Prism2
cards (HFA3841). The latest version I have tested with such card is
1.3.4. Newer images might be available, but it might require some
searching.

> my goal is to use the firmware wep encription of 1.4.9 
> because the  driver's wep make the unit run about 25% 
> slower (this "beast" has a 486SX/33 running the system),
> but only if it is safe to do so

Are you sure that the wlan card would be any better in WEP processing?
Quite many of the older Prism2 cards have quite poor WEP performance
(throughput dropping from ca. 5.5 Mbps to 2.5 Mbps when enabling WEP)..
You might like to first confirm that you can get better results by
testing WEP e.g. in ad-hoc mode.

If the card-based WEP is fast enough and you manage to find 1.4.9 f/w
image for your card, remember also to upgrade Host AP driver since the
older versions were hard coded to use host-based WEP in Master mode no
matter what f/w version was used.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA




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