Update: Problems with Oricoco silver

[Dave Bonhoff]

On 21-Jan-04, at 00:06, IOXperts Support wrote:

<snip>

> Sorry for the delay--I've been ill recently, and am only now catching 
> up with a backlog of support email.  If other cards in the same 
> machine don't show the same symptoms, and if it's wavering in and out 
> before it fails completely, it really sounds like a hardware problem 
> of some sort.  I can't imagine what sleeping your Lombard could have 
> done, but the driver generally either works or it doesn't.  In 
> particular, the driver has no control over the signal strength or 
> whether or not the card is searching for the base station--it just 
> passes along what the card is reporting as its current status.  
> Clicking on "Apply now" in the preference pane will cause the driver 
> to attempt to reset the the card, but if the card is already having 
> problems, this may or may not succeed.

Sorry for being irate, but the transition to X.3 has been anything but 
smooth for me and the loss of WiFi has been adding to the stress, 
particularly at work where I am the only Mac user.  I have spent some 
time with some tech oriented people at work and they are thinking that 
it is either a hardware issue that just happened to manifest itself 
right after I registered the driver to the card, or that the firmware 
was somehow corrupted and that the update didn't correct this.

>> The fact that flashing the firmware to a newer revision has made such 
>> a dramatic change in operation further strengthens this feeling.
>
> It's certain suggestive.  Unfortunately, in all other Orinoco Silver 
> cards we've tested with, 8.10 and 8.72 versions of the firmware act 
> identically as far as connectivity is concerned.

I've noticed that there are 2 different firmwares listed, PRI and STA.  
After the update, only STA had been upgraded.  Is this correct?  Could 
the PRI firmware still be the cause of the problem?  I have also 
noticed that the signal strength bar shows 11Mbits when using the SMC 
card, but not when using the Orinoco card.  Does that imply anything or 
is it just a feature of the card?

If we can't get the Orinoco cardworking, then I'm going to have to 
switch to the SMC card that I have access to.  Would it be possible to 
change my registration to that card?

>
>>   The complete lack of communication, so far, from IOXperts support 
>> isn't encouraging though...
>
> Sorry about that.  We're small enough that having one or two people 
> get bitten by winter viruses can really impact our normally quick 
> support turnaround time.

I can appreciate your position as I am a 1 person department that 
operates 24/7/365 (somewhat automated) and am considered 'mission 
critical' to daily operations!  Downsizing...

> One thing that might help.  The next time it fails, open up a terminal 
> window and type the command "dmesg".  This will display the most 
> recent system log messages.  Whenever our driver gets unexpected 
> results from the card, we log a system message.  If the output of 
> "dmesg" shows a bunch of messages starting with "IOXperts 802.11 
> Driver", please copy those into an email message and forward it to 
> support at ioxperts.com.  That might help us track this down if it's a 
> driver problem, or confirm whether or not it's a hardware problem.

The card refused to work this morning, but for some reason unknown to 
me, the card has been working fine for about 2 hours now.  I will send 
you the log in a separate email since I doubt the list wants to see it. 
  [:^)

Thanks
Dave

---
The thing is, it's very easy to be different, but very difficult to be 
better. - Jonathan Ive