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 current 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 can be installed using fw_update(1).

EXAMPLES

The following example scans for available networks:

# ifconfig ipw0 scan

The following hostname.if(5) example configures ipw0 to join network “mynwid”, using WPA key “mywpakey”, obtaining an IP address using DHCP:

nwid mynwid wpakey mywpakey
dhcp

DIAGNOSTICS

ipw0: device timeout: The driver will reset the hardware. This should not happen.
ipw0: error N, could not read firmware ...: For some reason, the driver was unable to read the firmware image from the filesystem. The file might be missing or corrupted.