LucentWirelessCard - SeattleWireless

HardwareComparison | PcmciaBridges | OrinocoDriver

The Name & Brand associated with this card has changed several times. Known originally as the Lucent card, the "Orinoco" card was also later sold under the brand "Agere Systems". There were several different logos/labels because of these changes. Recently (Dec 2002) Proxim has bought the Orinoco product line and released a different card under the "Orinoco Gold" label to add more confusion to this Chaos

Note that the Proxim Orinoco b/g and a/b/g adapters use the Atheros chipset. The b/g card has an MC connector for external antennas.

As OEM card may be sold as: IBM as "IBM High Rate Wireless LAN Card", Compaq WL110, Compaq WL210 (PCI conv & WL110), Avaya, Buffalo .../... It's a long list. All rebrands, however, irrespective of gold, silver or stickers on the front, have the same FCC ID: IMRWLPCE24H

(Is there a complete list of rebrands available??) (ANYONE? Can ANYONE supply a definitive list?)

The Orinoco Gold card can also be found inside of a Lucent "USB-W" adapter. Remove the base and you will find the card and a USB to PCMCIA adapter within.

http://www.orinocowireless.com/ Homepage: Data sheet(pdf) (dead link)

Orinoco cards are based on the Hermes chipset; the supported chipset for Net Stumbler.

Transmit power: 35 mW (15 dBm). (is it possible to modify it????)

External Antenna connector

Orinoco's have an antenna jack which allows connection of an external antenna. At the end of the built-in antenna is a little cap that can be removed with a needle or thumbtack. It is very loosely attached, so you wont break it Usually you will need a PigTail for external antennas. This is slang for a short piece of coax that consists of a (small) "lucent" connector and a (larger) N connector on the other end. The small lucent connector is an "MC" type connector.

Access Point Operation Mode

Since end of February 2003 there is a Linux driver for Lucent Cards available, which supports AP Mode: HermesAp

AP mode requires special firmware downloaded to the card, which is lost and needs to be reloaded on a power cycle or card reset. That is what latest windows (and HermesAp) driver do, then it is possible to used this card in AP Mode mode under Windows 2000, also the latest version of the Orinoco driver for Windows 2000 (downloaded from Windows Update) has the option "Act as Base Station" (ref.), more info: http://www.bcwireless.net/moin.cgi/OrinocoHostAp, that is the reason why also linux drivers report different firmware version that windows drivers.

The HermesAp driver extracts the tertiary firmware from the Windows binaries and is able to load it to the cards ram.

Here you can find some reasons why it seemed not to be possible to make Orinoco or Lucent cards to work under Linux: http://lists.shmoo.com/pipermail/hostap/2002-November/000457.html

Some interesting threads about tertiary firmware: http://lists.shmoo.com/pipermail/hostap/2002-November/000341.html

HermesAP (BSS aka Managed aka Infrastructure) using Tertiary Firmware http://hunz.org/hermesap.html

--- I understand that Apples software allows a software controlled Access Point .

Gold, Silver and Bronze models

Agere has End Of Lifed the Bronze and Silver series cards, and now only manufacture the Gold series. It seems that they are not producing the original "Gold" series anymore, but have replaced it with a completely different card with a different chipset (and different implications for Linux compatibility). The original "Gold" Card is now sold as the "Classic Gold" card. The difference between Gold and Silver is the WEP encryption level. Bronze does no link encryption, Silver has 40bit keys while Gold can do 40bit and 104bit.

WEP does come in two flavours, with the underlying encryption mechanism being 64-bit RC4 and 128-bit RC4 respectively.

However in each case 24 bits of the RC4 key are used for the IV. Hence the actual settable WEP key is only 40 bits and 104 bits respectively. In Linux these can be set either as a hex number of the appropriate size, or as a string of length 5 or 13 respectively. Of course card vendors still market it as 128 bit WEP.

Silver cards are the most commonly found.

It is reported that you can upgrade Silver to Gold at home using Windows or MAC using the Apple Airport Updater on your Mac. KyleJones reports success with this using Airport 2.0.4. You don't have to do anything with the Airport software except install it. The installation process updates the fireware on the Orinoco card. To update multiple cards just reinstall the software on top of itself; you don't have to uninstall-reinstall.

Also have a look at this thread on netstumbler.com http://forums.netstumbler.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1389

UPDATE: 2004-05-14

The windows method described above is a hoax and doesn't work. I've finally got a working Windows-based Silver to Gold conversion working at

http://www.geocities.com/lincomatic/software.html

details on the intricacies of using it may be found at

http://forums.netstumbler.com/showthread.php?t=7538

Update: 2006-05-25

Above URL for the Windows-based Silver to Gold conversion program has been changed, now located is:

http://www.lincomatic.com/wireless/software.html

Q: What does seattlewireless need? 40bit? A: The mailing list has discussed this, general consensus is that encryption isn't that important if we want to mix brands. Anyone who needs security should tunnel using SSH or SSL(IPSec doesn't go through NAT). http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2001/02/23/wep.html describes setting up SSH tunnels.

LINUX DRIVERS

Be careful buying new Proxim cards labeled as Orinoco; They may not use the Agere chipset.

Available driver for linux:

- orinoco_cs: actually driver. Only supported in 2.4 kernel versions. Notes: OrinocoDriver

- wvlan_cs: deprecated in favour of orinoco_cs, last developed version was: 1.07, since pcmcia-cs version 3.1.32 (02-Mar-02) cards bind to "orinoco_cs" instead of to "wvlan_cs", anyway you can allways use it if you are having problems with the new development driver orinoco, as wvlan_cs is still distributed with most distributions.

- wavelan2_cs: Lucent propietary, distributed in binary format.

- wavelan_cs: support only for old (2 Mbits) orinoco cards

- mwavelan_cs: all existing drivers lack the ability to provide the signal strength measurement from all the access points reachable from a card, also add scanning support. As is based in a binary library provided by Agere, and Agere do not provide binary versions for IPAQ plataform.

- mwvlan: New development, modify wvlan_cs to add scanning support and completly open source as is based hcf-light source code.

In which kernel version can i find them?

kernel 2.4.X	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19
orinoco	-	-	-	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	0.09b	0.11b
orinoco_cs	-	-	-	?	?	?	?	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	0.09b	0.11b
orinoco_plx	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	?	?	?	?	?	?	x	x	0.09b	0.11b
orinoco_pci	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	0.11b
wvlan_cs	?	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x
mwavelan_cs	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	?	?

The orinoco_pci drivers supports native PCI cards such as D-Link DWL-520 and Linksys WMP-11. Lucent/Agere does not make a native PCI card.

NOTE: the orinoco_pci driver seems to be a bit unstable yet (0.11b). It will stop communicating with my cards after a couple hours and require me to unload and reload the driver.

Supported Modes: iBSS (Ad-Hoc) Peer, BSS Client. Actually orinoco cards do not support Host AP mode.

Patches:

Morinoco-Patch: This patch allows the orinoco_cs driver (version 11b) to do the scanning functionality (and some more features). The patch is based on a patch for orinoco_cs 9b (By Jean Tourrilhes) with some modifications.

FIRMWARE RELEASES

1.16, 4.08, 4.52, 6.04, 6.06, 6.16, , 7.28, 7.52 (Recommended), 8.10 (not recomended for working under linux (Winter 2002), 8.42, 8.72

You may need a specific driver version to update/downgrade your firmware here you can find some of them.

Anyway i have seen Compaq card reporting another firmware version 8.xx (i do not remmeber exactly), that the one reported by orinoco cards, but i have not able to find any information about firmware revisions or firmware upgrade tools under Compaq website. Any info about this point is welcomed!

It was probably an 8.42 Version. This can be observed on some LANCOM Systems Airlancer MC-11 cards before upgrading or downgrading.

Issues

- Actually latest firmware is 8.10 but you can seen Windows Client Manager to report 8.12 Screenshots for 8.12 reports and 8.42 versions if you use the windows update function and upgrade to driver version 7.64 (Screenshots: before upgrade, after upgrade)

- It seems that version 8.10 adds some sort of AP-Mode to the firmware. At least the Win9X drivers are able to switch the card into this mode ( LucentBssMode ). Various cards (Prism2/Symbol/Lucent) seem to be able to associate to this AP.

* How to know your firmware release under windows? use help/Version info menu from your client Manager, at the botton you will get version number Screenshots

* How to know your firmware realease under linux? Try to load orinoco_cs driver and then look form messages using dmeg command you will find something like: "eth0: Looks like a Lucent/Agere firmware version 7.28"

for example: 1) #modprobe orinoco_cs 2) #/etc/init.d/pcmcia restart

Note that Windows normally reports a different fireware version than linux. This is because the Windows drivers load tertiary firmware into volatile memory each time the drivers are loaded. Linux, on the other hand, uses the secondary firmware in the card's non-volatile memory.

Prism support page: http://www.proxim.com/support/contact/index.html