At 08:26 AM 1/15/2004, Felix Schmid wrote:
>I am trying to upgrade my net4501 to a wlan access point. After wasting 
>quite some amount of money, time and nerves in the process to find a 
>suitable NIC I am finally at the point where I agree to buy one of these 
>quite expensive netgate soekris kits...but before I want to make sure that 
>it's worth it.

I have an early net4501 (with the old style case) that is running a miniPCI 
card from NetGate.  It is the 802.11b Prism card (EL-2511MP PLUS), bought 
as part of the MP1-5 kit.  In fact, I'm about to post pictures and a how-to 
of the installation.

>Netgate sells a mini-pci 802.11g card based on atheros chipset. On the 
>m0n0wall troubleshooting page it is mentioned that m0n0wall works only 
>with cards supported by the 'wi' or 'an' drivers; the 'ath' driver is not 
>mentioned. Will it be difficult (if possible at all) to include the 'ath' 
>driver in my m0n0wall setup?

The problem there is m0n0wall is using FreeBSD 4.9 as its base and the ath 
driver didn't show up until FreeBSD 5.1.  4.9 is the version FreeBSD 
recommends as stable for production, 5.x is still wet behind the ears.

If you want to use the Atheros 802.11g card, you (or someone you bribe) 
will have to backport the driver, or you'll have to roll your own 5.x 
kernel file.


          -crl
--
Chad R. Larson (CRL22)    chad at eldocomp dot com
   Eldorado Computing, Inc.   602-604-3100
      5353 North 16th Street, Suite 400
        Phoenix, Arizona   85016-3228

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