hostap (was: good pcmcia card to build ap)

[Vince Vielhaber]

On Tue, 8 Apr 2003, 'Tobias Roth' wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 07, 2003 at 03:34:39PM +0200, Erik Paulsen Sklerud wrote:
> >
> > > I'm like Tobias looking to make an accessPoint, but with a
> > > PCI type card
> > > instead, but it should be the same I think? Could someone please name
> > > some cards based on the PRISM-chip, if that's the only card
> > > supporting hostAP
> > > in FreeBSD?
>
> but then, do I really need hostap? i tried out ad-hoc mode with a linksys
> card, and it seems to work just fine. i didn't get much smarter by googling
> for hostap. what are the advantages of it (especially when I use only one
> acess point, not multiple ones?). I have multiple machines that need to
> connect at the same time though, all with different operating systems
> (FreeBSD, WinXP, OSX). But that also shouldn't cause trouble, as far as I
> understand the situation.

I tried ad-hoc mode with orinoco cards once and while the freebsd machines
had no trouble communicating, windows wouldn't talk to either.  Putting a
prism based card in one of them (the one that was connected to the network
and the one we wanted as the access point) and putting it in hostap mode,
the other machines (freebsd and windows) had no trouble communicating with
it in BSS mode.

One thing I did see with the prism based cards was hard lockups apparently
due to a firmware problem.  They say it's fixed in 1.5.6, but it took a
windows 98 or higher laptop to flash it and I didn't have one available to
verify it.

Vince.
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