recommendations for wireless nics

[Paul Eskello]

Hi all,

looking for any recommendations regarding wireless lan pci cards and
freebsd, please.

Thx in advance.

Cheers,
Paul
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Re: recommendations for wireless nics

[Steve Franks]

Don't get the motorolas; you can check, but classically, they all have
non-open-source (and therefore unsupported) broadcom chipsets.  My
usual method is to type in the model number of the card and chipset
into a google search, which ususally works.  I'd say the atheros cards
are most widely used in freebsd, although anything prism/orinoco has
been supported forever too.  I tried a ralink with my laptop (non pci
obviously), but all laptops these days will lock up the bios if you
don't put a manufacturer approved card in, so I didn't get to try it.
Intel cards are also supported by iwi and ipw(?) drivers.  Just type
man wlan to get a list of drivers, man for each driver will give you
a pretty good idea of what chipsets.

Another consideration is that the pci-pcmcia docks are supported in
freebsd - I have an atheros card in a proprietary linksys dock for my
primary personal server with no hiccups.

I don't know under 6.2, but under 6.1 both intel and texas instruments
chipsets were supported, but you had to build some propriety/closed
source/licenced thingamabob from /usr/ports to get them to work, so
they are good after your system is running, but a pain if you are
installing and they are your only card.

Summary: my best luck has been the atheros.  Had some trouble on prism
with dhclient not renewing the ip when the link would drop
intermittently.  Several others reported similar issues.  One
resolution that I did not try was to use an alternate dhclient package
from /usr/ports, don't recall which.

Best,
Steve

On 2/3/07, Paul Eskello [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

Hi all,

looking for any recommendations regarding wireless lan pci cards and
freebsd, please.

Thx in advance.

Cheers,
Paul
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--
Steve Franks, KE7BTE
Staff Engineer
La Palma Devices, LLC
http://www.lapalmadevices.com
(520) 312-0089
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Re: recommendations for wireless nics

[Roland Smith]

On Sat, Feb 03, 2007 at 06:53:28PM +0100, Paul Eskello wrote:
 Hi all,
 
 looking for any recommendations regarding wireless lan pci cards and
 freebsd, please.

It is impossible to give a general recommendation like buy brand X,
model Y. Manufacturers sometimes switch chipsets on their cards without
changing the model number, and brand names may not be available
depending on where on the globe you are located.

The best advice is to look at all the wireless drivers (zgrep for 802.11
in /usr/share/man/man4/*), and look at cards in shops to identify the
chips they use. In my experience, the chipset used is seldom if ever
noted in the documentation or on the packaging. Sometimes all the chips
(not just the transmitter) are covered under a RF shield, in which case
you're out of luck.

In my experience, if you go into a computer shop and ask for a 802.11
card with a type Z chipset, the most likely response from the
salesperson will be a blank stare.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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