NAME
ipw —
Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 IEEE 802.11b
wireless network device
SYNOPSIS
ipw* at pci?
DESCRIPTION
The ipw driver provides support for the
Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 Mini PCI network adapter.
These are the modes the ipw driver can
operate in:
- BSS mode
- Also known as infrastructure mode, this is used when associating with an access point, through which all traffic passes. This mode is the default.
- IBSS mode
- Also known as IEEE ad-hoc mode or peer-to-peer mode. This is the standardized method of operating without an access point. Stations associate with a service set. However, actual connections between stations are peer-to-peer.
- monitor mode
- In this mode the driver is able to receive packets without associating with an access point. This disables the internal receive filter and enables the card to capture packets from networks which it wouldn't normally have access to, or to scan for access points.
The ipw driver can be configured to use
Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) or Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA-PSK and
WPA2-PSK). WPA is the de facto encryption standard for wireless networks. It
is strongly recommended that WEP not be used as the sole mechanism to secure
wireless communication, due to serious weaknesses in it. The
ipw driver relies on the software 802.11 stack for
both encryption and decryption of data frames.
The ipw driver can be configured at
runtime with
ifconfig(8) or on boot with
hostname.if(5).
FILES
The driver needs at least version 1.3 of the following firmware files, which are loaded when an interface is brought up:
- /etc/firmware/ipw-bss
- /etc/firmware/ipw-ibss
- /etc/firmware/ipw-monitor
These firmware files are not free because Intel refuses to grant distribution rights without contractual obligations. As a result, even though OpenBSD includes the driver, the firmware files cannot be included and users have to find these files on their own. The official person to state your views to about this issue is majid.awad@intel.com.
A prepackaged version of the firmware, designed to be used with pkg_add(1), can be found at:
http://firmware.openbsd.org/firmware/ipw-firmware-1.3p0.tgz
EXAMPLES
The following hostname.if(5) example configures ipw0 to join whatever network is available on boot, using WEP key “0x1deadbeef1”, channel 11, obtaining an IP address using DHCP:
dhcp NONE NONE NONE nwkey 0x1deadbeef1 chan 11
Configure ipw0 to join network “my_net” using WPA with passphrase “my_passphrase”:
# ifconfig ipw0 nwid my_net wpakey my_passphrase
Join an existing BSS network, “my_net”:
# ifconfig ipw0 192.168.1.1 netmask 0xffffff00 nwid my_net
DIAGNOSTICS
- ipw%d: device timeout
- The driver will reset the hardware. This should not happen.
- ipw%d: error %d, could not read firmware %s
- For some reason, the driver was unable to read the firmware image from the filesystem. The file might be missing or corrupted.
SEE ALSO
arp(4), ifmedia(4), intro(4), netintro(4), pci(4), hostname.if(5), ifconfig(8)
AUTHORS
The ipw driver was written by
Damien Bergamini
⟨damien@openbsd.org⟩.