Ric Messier wrote:
Does anyone have a Cisco AiroNet card working with Gentoo on a laptop? I did
up until a week or so ago when it just stopped working for no particular
reason. I get a high beep when pcmcia loads and then it is shortly followed
by a lower beep. The syslog shows the following:

Mar 23 21:48:37 [kernel] airo: Probing for PCI adapters
Mar 23 21:48:38 [kernel] airo: Doing fast bap_reads
Mar 23 21:48:38 [kernel] airo: Max tries exceeded waiting for command

I sometimes get a message indicating that it was unable to set MAC address.
To the best of my recollection, I made no changes to the system that would
have caused the interface to stop coming up -- it's possible that I turned
on a kernel module for something like SMB prior to the card no longer
working. I did it from the .config file that created the existing kernel and
modules. I dual boot my laptop with Windows XP. The card continues to work
perfectly under XP.

I spent this past weekend building and re-building various kernels and
pcmcia drivers, etc, etc. No luck. At best, I can get the lights on the card
to turn on. But I still get no interface showing up. And I can't begin to
tell you how painful a process that was using lilo and the NT boot loader
(grub just refuses to behave whereas lilo always performs exactly as
expected ... even if i have to reload it every time i rebuild the kernel).

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. The last time this happened (a
few months back), I attributed it to an emerge system that I did without
paying attention to consequences. I rebuilt, used the kernel drivers and
everything worked nicely for a few months. I'd prefer not to rebuild from
scratch again given how loooonnggg a process it is.

I have a cisco aironet 350 pcmcia card, and I have it working with 2.4 kernels fine (not 2.5 though).

HOWEVER, I did have the same problem as you a few months ago. I went a week without it working, but essentially, what it came down to was in Windows XP, I was using microsoft's driver for the card, rather than ciscos. Windows Update decided it would be a good idea to update the driver, i didnt care so I let it. However, the driver update flashed the firmware on the card (you'll notice by looking at the version number).

Downloading cisco's diagnostic software & firmware image (as well as the xp drivers to avoid future issues) i restored the card back to a usable state.

You might have a similar problem. Good luck,

-Chris I

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