Success story 1-3

Raffaele Raf raffaele1963 at yahoo.it
Tue May 20 00:16:06 EDT 2003


Success story 1

The main characters:

Hostap, Openap, Prism 2 pcmcia cards, 1 USRobotics
2450 Access Point,
1 Centennial SRAM 2MB 5 volts pcmcia card, and a
sleepless mind.

All began with a journey on the Internet. 
I found some info about the Openap project, but it was
too complex for me, and at that time I had no interest
for
the wireless world.

Some time later, a friend of mine asked me to
configure 
a couple of Intel Pro/Wireless 2011b Access Points,
the only to my knowledge capable of providing both
bridging and access point services at the same time.

It was a nightmare, also because those devices were
built
by Symbol, and the documentation on the configuration
file uploadable 
into the devices taken from the Intel site was full of
errors. 

But I am a bonehead, and after some sleepless nights,
I could understand the logic and make it happen,
thanks 
also to Symbol's very accurate documentation.

There were however some big issues:

1) The price: about $500 per unit.
2) Intel is dropping the product, and the Symbol
equivalent is even     
   more expensive.

So Openap came back up into my mind.
I knew linux enough to accept the challenge, so I
began 
to collect information.

I borrowed a Prism 2 card from a friend of mine and
started
to play. Luckily (or unfortunately), the first issue
that
became clear in my mind was that it was necessary to
update
the firmware into the card in order to make it
compatible
with the access point mode managed by Hostap/Openap.

Guess what, I killed the card right away.
This stopped my fight. I cut the cover of the pcmcia
card in the desperate attempt to find a reset jumper,
but as most of you know, if was perfectly useless.
I saved the card, though a part of me was suggesting
to throw it away, and picked up the phone to apologize
with my friend for the death of his card.

After roughly 1 month, during a trip on the net, I 
landed on the Hostap Mail list, and was very pleased
to 
hear about a "genesis mode" that could bring my card
back to life. It was existing, but who knew enough
about it, did
not explain exactly how to use it, also because it
involved
the utilization of hardware procedures dangerous for
the card and for the pc hosting the card.

So I jumped on top of my mouse and started to surf
again.
My lucky star kissed me on my eyes, since after a very
short time, I found the info I needed at the following
address:

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,6169125~root=wlan~mode=flat

and the information was:


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