NAME
an —
Aironet Communications 4500/4800 IEEE
802.11FH/b wireless network device
SYNOPSIS
an* at pcmcia?
an* at pci?
an* at isapnp?
DESCRIPTION
The an driver provides support for the
Aironet Communications 4500, 4800 (aka Cisco 340), and Cisco 350 IEEE 802.11
wireless network adapters. This includes the ISA, PCI, and PCMCIA varieties.
The 4500 series adapters operate at 1 and 2Mbps (FH) while the 4800 and 350
series can operate at 1, 2, 5.5, and 11Mbps (DS). The ISA, PCI, and PCMCIA
devices are all based on the same core PCMCIA modules and all have the same
programming interface. However, unlike the Lucent WaveLAN/IEEE cards, the
ISA and PCI cards appear to the host as normal ISA and PCI devices and do
not require any PCMCIA support.
ISA cards can either be configured to use ISA Plug and Play or to
use a particular I/O address and IRQ by properly setting the DIP switches on
the board. (The default switch setting is for plug and play.) The
an driver has Plug and Play support and will work in
either configuration, however when using a hard-wired I/O address and IRQ,
the driver configuration and the NIC's switch settings must agree. PCI cards
require no switch settings of any kind and will be automatically probed and
attached.
All host/device interaction with the Aironet cards is via
programmed I/O. The an driver encapsulates all IP
and ARP traffic as 802.11 frames, though it can receive either 802.11 or
802.3 frames.
These are the modes the an 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 an driver can be configured to use
hardware Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP). It is strongly recommended that WEP
not be used as the sole mechanism to secure wireless communication, due to
serious weaknesses in it.
The an driver can be configured at runtime
with ifconfig(8) or on boot with
hostname.if(5).
EXAMPLES
The following hostname.if(5) example configures an0 to join network “mynwid”, using WEP key “mywepkey”, obtaining an IP address using DHCP:
nwid mynwid nwkey mywepkey dhcp
DIAGNOSTICS
- an0: failed to allocate N bytes on NIC
- The driver was unable to allocate memory for transmit frames in the NIC's on-board RAM.
- an0: device timeout
- The Aironet card failed to generate an interrupt to acknowledge a transmit command.
SEE ALSO
arp(4), ifmedia(4), intro(4), isapnp(4), netintro(4), pci(4), pcmcia(4), hostname.if(5), ifconfig(8)
HISTORY
The an device driver first appeared in
FreeBSD 4.0. OpenBSD support
was added in OpenBSD 2.7. A version of the driver
based on the one in NetBSD was added in
OpenBSD 3.9.
AUTHORS
The an driver was written by
Bill Paul
<wpaul@ee.columbia.edu>
and ported to OpenBSD by Michael
Shalayeff
<mickey@openbsd.org>.
Later the NetBSD version of the driver by
Atsushi Onoe was subsequently ported to
OpenBSD by Jonathan Gray
<jsg@openbsd.org>.
CAVEATS
Scanning for access points is not currently supported.