The Iggblog

Nerd venting/musing behind the cut. Not even going to bother with cliffnotes for non-nerds… I promise you’re not missing out on anything cool.

h’ok, so…

I don’t really use wireless. but like every good nerd, I want the option. Sometimes I want to take my laptop downstairs, or do something wireless-flavored on my PDA. I used to have a small wireless router behind my firewall (the legendary pipboy), but it shit the bed randomly and was never very reliable to start. So without really looking into the specifics, I found out what wireless cards are able to be put into access-point mode under OpenBSD. I found the Ralink driver (ral) had some devices available at retail stores and it did indeed support AP mode. so I bebop’d down to CompUSA and got myself a Linksys WMP54G and tossed it in pipboy. Ever since, it has been “almost reliable”. Depending which PCI slot I put it in, it would get between 10% and 30% packet loss and an occasional error. I attributed this to noise due to pipboy being such a small form factor.

I tried putting the wireless card into the server that runs iggdawg.com (aka “that warm place my cat likes to sit”), thinking I would run the wireless segment off my server instead of my router/firewall. it registered in pciconf but the driver didn’t even load. complete failure. aRouter is OpenBSD, server is FreeBSD for reference.

Turns out pipboy has strong Juju. The card I got, and most wireless cards, require PCI version 2.2 compliant BIOS in order to work. PCI 2.2 didn’t even exist until 1999 and wasn’t implemented universally till later than that. Pipboy’s BIOS has a 1997 date stamp. this wireless card requires 3.3v input, and PCI 2.1 is a 5v signaling environment. This card has no business even functioning in pipboy. And yet it works exactly as it should, just with like 10% packet loss. I can still browse the web just fine or whatever if I bring lappy downstairs. and when I put it in the machine it IS compliant with, it fails completely.

So I’ve decided to proudly reinstall the card into pipboy and let it work its voodoo until I need to upgrade the firewall/router entirely. I’ve learned that sometimes when I come across black magic that works better than science, I should just stick with the black magic… and be happy with at least figuring out how to control it even if I can’t for the life of me figure out why it works.