wavelan
is the low-level device driver for the NCR / AT&T / Lucent
WaveLAN ISA
and Digital (DEC)
RoamAbout DS
wireless ethernet adapter.
This driver is available as a module or
might be compiled in the kernel.
This driver supports multiple cards
in both forms (up to 4) and allocates the next available ethernet
device (eth0..eth#) for each card found, unless a device name is
explicitly specified (see below).
This device name will be reported
in the kernel log file with the MAC address, NWID and frequency used
by the card.
Parameters
This section apply to the module form (parameters passed on the
insmod(8)
command line).
If the driver is included in the kernel, use the
ether=IRQ,IO,NAME
syntax on the kernel command line.
io
Specify the list of base address where to search for wavelan cards
(setting by dip switch on the card).
If you don't specify any io
address, the driver will scan 0x390 and 0x3E0 addresses, which might
conflict with other hardware...
irq
Set the list of irq that each wavelan card should use (the value is
saved in permanent storage for future use).
name
Set the list of name to be used for each wavelan cards device (name
used by
ifconfig(8)).
Wireless Extensions
Use
iwconfig(8)
to manipulate wireless extensions.
NWID (or domain)
Set the network ID
[0
to
FFFF]
or disable it
[off].
As the NWID is stored in the card Permanent Storage Area, it will be
reuse at any further invocation of the driver.
Frequency & channels
For the 2.4GHz 2.00 Hardware, you are able to set the frequency by
specifying one of the 10 defined channels
(2.412,2.422, 2.425, 2.4305, 2.432, 2.442, 2.452, 2.460, 2.462
or
2.484)
or directly by its value.
The frequency is changed immediately and
permanently.
Frequency availability depends on the regulations...
Statistics spy
Set a list of MAC addresses in the driver (up to 8) and get the last
quality of link for each of those (see
iwspy(8)).
/proc/net/wireless
status
is the status reported by the modem.
Link quality
reports the quality of the modulation on the air (direct sequence
spread spectrum) [max = 16].
Level
and
Noise
refer to the signal level and noise level [max = 64].
The
crypt discarded packet
and
misc discarded packet
counters are not implemented.
Private Ioctl
You may use
iwpriv(8)
to manipulate private ioctls.
Quality and Level threshold
Enable you the define the quality and level threshold used by the
modem (packet below that level are discarded).
Histogram
This functionality allow to set a number of signal level intervals and
to count the number of packets received in each of those defined
intervals.
This distribution might be used to calculate the mean value
and standard deviation of the signal level.
Specific Notes
This driver will fail to detect some
non-NCR/ATT&T/Lucent
Wavelan cards.
If this happens for you, you must look in the source code on
how to add your card to the detection routine.
Some of the mentioned features are optional.
You may enable to disable
them by changing flags in the driver header and recompile.
This page is part of release 3.14 of the Linux
man-pages
project.
A description of the project,
and information about reporting bugs,
can be found at
http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
