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NAME

iwi — Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG/2225BG/2915ABG IEEE 802.11a/b/g wireless network device

SYNOPSIS

iwi* at pci?

DESCRIPTION

The iwi driver provides support for Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG/2915ABG Mini PCI and 2225BG PCI network adapters.

These are the modes the iwi 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 iwi 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 iwi driver relies on the software 802.11 stack for both encryption and decryption of data frames.

The iwi driver can be configured at runtime with ifconfig(8) or on boot with hostname.if(5).

FILES

The driver needs at least version 3.1 of the following firmware files, which are loaded when an interface is brought up:

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 download 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:

The following hostname.if(5) example configures iwi0 to join network “mynwid”, using WPA key “mywpakey”, obtaining an IP address using DHCP:

nwid mynwid
wpakey mywpakey
dhcp

DIAGNOSTICS

iwi0: device timeout

The driver will reset the hardware. This should not happen.

iwi0: 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.

SEE ALSO

arp(4), ifmedia(4), intro(4), netintro(4), pci(4), hostname.if(5), ifconfig(8)

HISTORY

The iwi driver first appeared in OpenBSD 3.7.

AUTHORS

The iwi driver was written by Damien Bergamini <damien.bergamini@free.fr>.