Wireless troubles

[Jeff LaMarche]

I apologize for having to post this, but I've read all the relevant 
posts on this list and done exhaustive research online as well and I 
still can't get it working. I know I'm probably missing something 
obvious, but...

I've got an IBM ThinkPad 770 with an Orinoco Gold wireless card (Lucent 
chipset) onto which I've installed FreeBSD 4.6.2. I am trying to 
connect it with an Apple Airport Extreme base station (set to use 
802.11b not g). (I have previously used this exact same hardware and 
software combination successfully)

In rc.conf, I have added:

pccard_enable="YES"

which allows the card to be recognized and assigned an IRQ and I can 
issue it commands using wicontrol. That all appears to be happening 
correctly.

I also have tried two different lines (based on different entries I've 
found on the list and on the web) to tell the system to use DHCP to 
configure this card. They are:

ifconfig_wi0="DHCP"

and

pccard_ifconfig="DHCP"

There does not appear to be any difference with the two versions; the 
former one is what I currently have. I also have a hostname= line, but 
I don't believe that that is part of the problem.

In /usr/local/etc/rc.d/ I created a file called wireless.sh as root and 
gave execute permissions to owner and group. I have played around with 
different wicontrol commands in the script, but the script looks 
essentially like this:

sleep 7
wicontrol -p 1
wicontrol -n LaMarche\ Family 	#It's correct, but I've tried also in 
quotes, and leaving out
wicontrol -e 1
wicontrol -k 0xMYKEY 		#Yes, it's correct... I've triple compared
wicontrol -f 10				#10 is what my base station is set to use, but I 
have tried others
wicontrol -t 3    				# I've tried leaving this out: no change
#wicontrol -s Thinkpad770	# Leaving this in or our doesn't affect the 
problem
#wicontrol -c 1				# Leaving this in or our doesn't affect the problem
wicontrol wi0 -o

I have also tried adding a dhclient wi0 call to the end of the script, 
which does not work and under some settings has caused the system to 
hang.

If I do a ifconfig wi0 with these settings, I have an ip address of 
0.0.0.0, and a status of "no carrier". If I put the system in ad hoc 
mode using wicontrol -p 3, I get a status of associated (and the green 
ready light comes on on the card), but it still doesn't get an IP 
address, even if I issue a dhclient or do an ifconfig on wi0. I am able 
to connect to this base station using this exact same hardware but with 
Windows XP installed, and get the same situation when I swap out the 
card for another  one that I know works.

When I do a wicontrol, everything looks as expected, but I'm not sure 
about two items:

1) Promiscuous mode is off.
2) Comms quality/signal/noise is [ 0 27 27 ], which I'm not sure how to 
read.

If anyone has any thoughts on what I've missed or done wrong, I'd 
certainly appreciate the feedback; I've been pulling my hair out on 
this one for two days. I'm especially bugged by it because I've done it 
before and gotten it to work.

Thanks, and sorry for the long e-mail
Jeff LaMarche