Subject: prism2_srec howto ..... thanks!
From: Jayson Anderson <sonick@sonick.com>
To: jsun@junsun.net
Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2005 01:43:28 -0700

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Greetings Sir,

I just wanted to write to let you know that your howto in regards to
upgrading primary and station firmware on prismx.x cards was a great
help to me. More than just help actually, it was my entire checklist and
method of approach; as it seemed more comprehensive than most other
illustrations out there. Particularly in the line of caveats in regards
what NOT to do, I certainly didn't want to trash my pcmcia card.

Anyway, I needed a prism chipset for my laptop so I could run hostap(d)
for various reasons, and since my cisco aironet 350 was not a supported
device, I went the cheap route and found a Microsoft (grudgingly) MN-520
card on ebay and popped it into my dell inspirion 4K notebook. I had
hermes/orinoco compiled in monolithicly and the card was found, so I'm
assuming those drivers found it. Anyway, I went back into my kernel
config and modularized everything in regards to wireless networking and
pcmcia cards, including the kernel patches and hostap files diffed and
copied in with the kernel source for 2.6.12.4. I then made sure to
enable PRISM2_DOWNLOAD_SUPPORT and PRISM2_NON_VOLATILE_DOWNLOAD
in ./net/wireless/hostap_config.h.  I should also note that
hostap-driver is version 0.3.9 (latest stable as of now), and
hostap-utils are version 0.3.7 (latest stable as of now). I plan on
moving to the beta but NOT until firmware was updated.

I don't have the literal output from prior saved, but the device is a
Prism2.5 SST/PCMCIA, which was running  PRIID 1.1.0 and STAID of 1.4.9.
I checked the compat table (thank you for that link!!) and saw I needed
to be using pkN and sfN, so I copied pk010101.hex and sf010804.hex into
my home dir and su to root. Dry run did not show any idiosyncracies so I
went ahead and issued prism2_srec -vv -f wlan0 pk010101.hex
sf010804.hex ; it spit out a few things and then said to wait 30
seconds, don't power off, etc etc.... in about 15 seconds it was all
done!

Now, the diag output is as such:

[root@mu ~]# hostap_diag wlan0
Host AP driver diagnostics information for 'wlan0'

NICID: id=0x800c v1.0.0 (PRISM II (2.5) PCMCIA (SST parallel flash))
PRIID: id=0x0015 v1.1.1
STAID: id=0x001f v1.8.4 (station firmware)

So, everything is groovy and I'm about to go dump all the recs and check
that out as well in addition to checking out all the card features for
proper operation, then will be setting up a EAP/RADIUS enabled access
point using hostapd and this card.

Thanks to your HOWTO, my upgrade process was simple, CORRECT the first
time and without any surprises. I greatly appreciate your efforts and
will pass the site along to colleagues!

Best Regards,

Jayson Anderson
Phoenix, AZ
sonick@sonick.com
GPG Key fingerprint = B581 122A F3D4 C4DE 2E7D  5DB0 04DA 6805 443C C524