[LUNI] 802.11b Wireless

[Beach, Ken]

> From: Beach, Ken [mailto:kbeach at ldrind.com]
> 
> Greetings,
> 
> Ok, here's the deal. I have a Proxim RangeLAN-DS pcmcia 
> 802.11b card, it
> runs the Prism2 chipset, and works fine using the wvlan_cs driver.
> 
> The whole thing is running on a Dell Latitude running Debian Potato.
> 
> My problem is, no matter what I set the ESSID, it still works 
> fine. I have
> access to 2 different, non-overlapping networks, both issue 
> IP addresses
> using DHCP, and yet, no matter how I change the settings, the 
> card works on
> both networks.
> 
> My understanding (from working with Doze based computers) 
> that if the ESSID
> is set wrong, it won't sync to the wireless network.
> 
> I know, most of you are probably saying "It works, what's the 
> problem", but
> I'm afraid I will have problems when I try to function in an 
> overlapping
> environment. I haven't tried to run it in ad-hoc mode yet, 
> but I'm concerned
> that it won't work correctly there either...
> 
> Can someone shed some insight on my problem?
> 
> Cheers,
> Ken
> 

Ok, here's what I found. My problem was wireless-tools were installed
incorrectly. Once that was corrected, everything worked fine. Wireless-tools
were required to pass the wireless extensions from the wireless.opts to the
driver. Interestingly enough, if I don't specify any options at all in
wireless.opts, it still picks up the first network it sees, how convenient!
No need to create different profiles for home and work.

Cheers,
Ken