I've never actually tried it, but the Orinoco Gold* and Cisco 350 cards can supposedly be made to work with WPA-PSK, using particular versions of their respective drivers and client utilities (and maybe a firmware update as well). I kinda have a nasty suspicion that it'll only work on XP, though...
Cisco Aironet 350 Driver Wpa
There isn't real WPA2 wireless DOS support, even for CardBus WLAN cards, let alone 16Bit PCMCIA. Aironet Cards only support WEP networks in DOS drivers. WPA1 Support inside Windows only with latest drivers and firmware.
The trick is to find cards with NIC chips that have Win98 drivers. Fortunately I had a Linksys WPC54G version 2 (v2) that had a TNET1130 chip. I found some generic drivers that were for 98SE and came with the absolutely required WLAN utility (Win98 has no wireless connectivity at all). It worked with even WPA2 AES!
To begin with, I had to research what hardware might have functioning DOS drivers (yeah, the laptop could dual boot to Windows 98, but that would be much more hassle than the CF card). There appear to be two families of WiFi PC Cards with DOS drivers: Cisco Aironet 350 (or possibly 340 and even older models), and Lucent/Agere/Proxim ORiNOCO. The latter can be found in many OEM products, with the usual headache of identifying what the heck is inside a given PC Card and how the OEM might have mangled the reference design to break generic drivers.
The driver requires some manual configuration: The PROTOCOL.INI file needs to be edited to at minimum add the SSID (forget roaming!), and potentially change various settings. The driver should be able to either use Socket Services or an Intel 365SL style controller (which the ThinkPad 760XL has, but I have Socket Services installed anyway).
The two chip families both offer packet drivers and Novell ODI drivers. Curiously, it appears that only Aironet also had NDIS drivers, as confirmed by official documentation. Note that there were older pre-IEEE WaveLAN NDIS drivers (going back at least as far as 1994) but no confirmation could be found that those work with IEEE 802.11b ORiNOCO cards.
The latter is extra annoying when debugging any startup problems because if a driver fails to load, the machine needs to be rebooted before another attempt. And compared to a wired network, the number of things that can go wrong with WiFi is significantly higher.
Btw have you done any experiments with protocol wrappers? Not sure which wrappers exist and if they are any good, but in general there seems to be wrappers available to run a client requiring one kind of klient with a network card that only has another kind of driver.
Steps 1 and 2 are simple in theory, but are turning out to a significant challenge for the entire food chain of wireless LAN related manufacturers. Since most consumer networking gear comes from a network of OEM and ODMs in Taiwan, those companies must first absorb the code from the wireless chip companies and then grind out the driver and firmware updates for their customers.
Now that I saw what Broadcom could do, I turned my attention to Intersil. Since WLAN equipment manufacturers have yet to release WPA drivers for any Intersil-based products, I went directly to Intersil for help.
So it looks like Intersil did a good job with their WPA implementation for their 11b chipsets. Now if only manufacturers will do the work they need to do and get their WPA driver upgrades finished and posted for download!
As I was getting ready to publish this NTK, Atheros provided me with WPA-capable drivers that I tried with a NETGEAR WAG511, which is based on Atheros AR5001X+ a/b/g chipset. Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful in getting the Atheros client to work with WPA enabled. With the Intersil / Ubicom reference setup, everything worked fine with WPA disabled. But when I enabled WPA-PSK, I could associate with the AP, but not pass traffic.
Method 1: Radio driver is asked by power manager to go to low power state Suspend/resume without cutting power to radio Method 2: Radio driver is asked by power manager to go to low power state Cut power to radio Suspend/ Resume Reapply power to radio Eject/insert radio Note 1: Method 1 is the simplest way to deal with suspend/resume, but the OEM needs to consider the current consumption of the radio at a low power state. For example, current consumption for the 40NBT is 7.7mA and for the 45N it is 200uA. Note 2 : In general, method 1 is more recommended because method 2 may cause a delay to make the radio reconnect after resume.
I used to have a Netgear 802.11b PCMCIA card in my IBM Thinkpad 760ED that ran Win98. I used to use it to remote desktop into my XP machine at the time. I'm pretty sure it had Windows 95 drivers as well.
I like to use Ethernet to wifi converters for OSes with no modern wireless drivers. Just use the wired driver. This does not work well for public wifi though because you need an XP computer to run the app that configures the device, or at the very least use a web interface to select the wi-fi Network you want to connect to. These web interface configuration utilities aren't always the most intuitive to use if you know what I mean. Here is a link to one on Amazon:
The first kind, the original WaveLAN, really does support basically all the network stacks from the mid 90s. There are NDIS2 and ODI drivers for DOS 5.0+ and Windows for Workgroups, plus NDIS3 drivers for Windows 95 and NT. There might be a packet driver too though if not shims would allow the ODI or NDIS2 driver to be used. They come in PCMCIA, ISA and MCA variants.
Later on when 802.11 was ratified in the late 90s Lucent reused the WaveLAN brand for a line of standard 802.11 WiFi hardware which was eventually renamed ORiNOCO. These appear to have a 16bit ODI driver (Netware / IPX) and a Packet driver for DOS, plus NDIS drivers for Windows 9x and NT. No DOS or Windows for Workgroups NDIS drivers though with shims you might be able to get away with the 16bit ODI driver. Drivers for this hardware can currently be found here.
Capturing packets on a wireless LAN interface can be fun because you can see what other nearby laptops and access points are sending. By inspecting individual wireless LAN frames, you can see the detailed operation of the wireless LAN medium access control. I first tried capturing wireless LAN packets in 2002. Then, as it is now, the major difficulty was having drivers for your wireless card that support capturing (i.e. monitor or promiscuous mode). Then I used Cisco Aironet 350 PCMCIA cards, RedHat Linux and Ethereal (now called Wireshark). Nowadays many more cards are supported, but most features of capturing are usually only possible under Unix-like operating systems (its hard/impossible in Windows).
And the source needs to be set to identify your wireless LAN interface (wlan0 on my computer, as well as the driver and card (ath5k is the driver for my atheros based wireless card on my Samsung laptop. Steps for setting up Kismet on a Lenovo Ideapad V470 are described here.):
Wireless network cards for computers require control software to make them function (firmware, device drivers). This is a list of the status of some open-source drivers for 802.11 wireless network cards.
First of all, you need a PCMCIA slot, mostly PC CARD type II. This can be either a regular PC Card slot in a notebook, or it can also be a PCI-to-PCMCIA adapter using the PLX driver (included in Generic PRISM device driver).
Please do NOT bombard me with e-mails asking for these drivers; I won't give them. I got them for testing purposes only, and I promised both IBM and the developer that I wouldn't distribute them. Please wait until they become available via SoftWare Choice (which should be really soon now), or get an IBM business contract. Also, please don't bother IBM with questions regarding the drivers in development that are not available to the public yet.
The Artem ComCards are - at present - the only wireless cards that come with OS/2 support out-of the box. BinTec and Jakarta Blue cards are OEM variants of the Artem card. They all work with the same driver, the ComCard NDIS 2.01 Treiber (latest version is 1.5), which can be downloaded from the our WiFi drivers download page. This driver is also included in eComStation 1.1 (although not the latest version). Note that the driver available for download from the Artem web site is not the latest version. The driver comes in a static ZIP-file, which you need to unzip the files of to x:\IBMCOM\MACS, where x: is the drive on which OS/2 is installed. Artem regularly provides updates and bug fixes. There is a also very good article available about how to install these drivers on eCS and OS/2. Mensys distributes all of these cards actively in Europe, and Artem sells directly to individuals in the Americas. OS/2 CHL hardware testing team has tested some of these devices, and they offer very reasonable performance for reasonable pricing. BinTek also hosts a driver for their cards, but that is just the same driver as that of Artem. All Artem cards support 64-bit and 128-bit encryption. Artem driver revisions 1.5 and higher are designed to work with the nice IBM WiFiState utility.
Artem is currently assessing the market to investigate if OS/2 users would be interested in IEEE 802.11g. Thus, it is likely that the company will release drivers for these products too, sooner or later. More about this later...
Some other very professional device is the IBM High Rate Wireless PC Card 128. Just as CISCO, IBM can go along the ride with superior performance, combined with extremely high pricing. The driver is specifically for this card, and cannot be used with other Orinoco cards. The driver was in internal IBM beta testing for some months, but now it has finally been made general availability via IBM Device Driver Pak Online (need valid and active SoftWare Choice or PassPort Advantage subscription). It is also available via eComStation download site, if you have a login to access the downloads section. The self-extracting file ibmwifi2.exe contains a DDP file, a good readme, and all things that can be desirable. Surely, just as is the case with the CISCO driver, this driver was meant to be for business needs. It is also equipped with the WiFiStat.exe utility, discussed in a later section. On the global IBM web site, OS/2 support is stated: "IBM is offering OS/2 device drivers and support for these OS/2 drivers for the IBM PCMCIA Wireless LAN cards on a fee basis. For more information please contact emeawarp@de.ibm.com." This means, the driver is also available via IBM business contracts in case you wouldn't dispose of a SWC or PPA subscription. 2ff7e9595c
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