te: Sun, 21 Jan 2007 19:21:43 -0500
From: "Alexandre Guédon" <totalworlddomination at gmail dot com>
To: jsun@junsun.net
Subject: prism2.5 flash update: feedback

Hi,
Thanks for your page, i have been looking for this for a long time! :-]

I've had an old IBM Thinkpad R30 (2656-6AF) since 2002 and it had all
kind of bugs with the wifi card (often needing a complete hardware
reboot) and WEP and i gave up.

lspci result for the card:
00:0c.0 Network controller: Intersil Corporation Prism 2.5 Wavelan
chipset (rev 01)

Recently i had access to more wireless gear so i thought i'd try to
see if it was possible to make WPA work on this device and revive it
for some random uses. So after installing debian etch RC1 here is what
i was getting:

Before upgrade (hostap_diag eth0):

NICID: id=0x8013 v1.0.0 (PRISM II (2.5) Mini-PCI (SST parallel flash))
PRIID: id=0x0015 v1.0.5
STAID: id=0x001f v1.3.3 (station firmware)

The new 2.6 kernel were also aware of two bugs in the card's firmware
and had workarounds... It seemed to be working but i wanted WPA
support or nothing! ;)

I found this page in the mean time:
http://www.aircrack-ng.org/doku.php?id=prism2_flashing

and basically ended up trying this:
./prism2_srec wlan0 -D > pda; cp pda pda.bak
#Edit pda and put 3FFF at offset 0104 (line 24).
wget http://linux.junsun.net/intersil-prism/firmware/1.7.4/pk010101.hex
wget http://linux.junsun.net/intersil-prism/firmware/1.7.4/sf010704.hex
./prism2_srec -v -f wlan0 pk010101.hex sf010704.hex -P pda

Here is the result:
After upgrade (hostap_diag eth0):
NICID: id=0x8013 v1.0.0 (PRISM II (2.5) Mini-PCI (SST parallel flash))
PRIID: id=0x0015 v1.1.1
STAID: id=0x001f v1.7.4 (station firmware)

Before, i could easily see 2 access points (both running in WPA personal
mode).

Now, after the first or second reboot it saw the farthest access point
(with a hard to get signal) but never saw mine, 1 meter away. After
that $(iwlist scan) didn't return anything anymore most of the time.

Also, removing hostap and hostap_pci from the kernel sometimes causes
a hardware lockup (reboot! ;) ...

Doing:
./prism2_srec wlan0 -D > pda-2
shows that it's the same as it was before the modification, as if the
patch wasn't applied (least of my troubles right now but, worth noting
;)

So, this is what my experience has been until now... I'll keep you
updated if i ever get this fixed (i doubt it ;)

cheers,
Alex

P·S· you can post my name / mail (obfuscated) and if you have any
hints, i'd be glad to here them... ;)