Okay! Firstly, thank you all for your help. I would like to post what I have done for posterity. I hope no one has to go through everything I went through with this. (Using a US Robotics USR2410 802.11b wireless nic).
PROBLEM 1: The card did not seem to respond in any way no matter what I did. SOLUTION: Firmware update was, in fact, necessary (As Todd guessed). PROBLEM 2: Acquiring the firmware. Going to Intersil.com was a waste of time (even though they made the prism2 chip). Wound up getting referred to Connexant's website. Another dead end. Don't waste your time there either. SOLUTION: Finding the magical combination of words for a google search to turn up this site: http://linux.junsun.net/intersil-prism/ . Where ever you are Jun, thank you! PROBLEM 3: The page refers to a dos utility that it itself does not host. It is a link or two removed from the site, and when you find it, it points you to a broken link on the Hawking website. All subsequent search engine searches seem to point to same broken link. SOLUTION (sorta): decide to try linux utility prism2_srec to update (figuring I can boot to knoppix). PROBLEM 3a: Can't find that utility anywhere either, seems to be referred to all over the web, but can't find download source. Rumor has it that is in the HostAp suite, but I read the readme in that tarball and did a find . -iname "*srec" and similar such things and did not find it therein. PROBLEM 4: Stuart was kind enough to find out where hawking was hoarding its w110p.exe file. For future reference, it is here: http://www.hawkingtech.com/images/drivers/we110p.exe . I tried many variants on the hawking site (thinking the file might have been moved rather than deleted), but that one escaped me. Thanks Stuart. Now that I had the dos flash utility, however, it didn't work for me! It would not detect my cardbus -- even when using the legacy.exe as suggested. SOLUTION: As much as I didn't want to do this, I bit the bullet, and did a win98 install. I dug up an old win98 disk, and borrowed another hard drive so I wouldn't have to nuke my progress with OBSD. Well, due to hardware problems, couldn't do that. So I *did* nuke my OBSD install, installed win98, and all the drivers for that wireless nic. ULTIMATELY, I wound up using the windows utility to flash the 1.7.1 (Utility complained about 1.7.4). Since I had it up, I confirmed that it did work under windows. I nuked my win98 install, reinstalled OBSD 3.6, wrote a new /etc/hostname.wi0 that looks like this: !/sbin/wicontrol wi0 -e1 -k 0xmylongobnoxioushexkey -n myssid -t3 -f 6 -F 0 -A 2 dhcp NONE NONE NONE And BAM! It works! Praise be! And it only took me about 16 hours of solid work! Thank you all for your help. None of it was wasted. I hope that someday this post will be able to help someone else and your efforts will not have to be repeated. Chris
