WLAN Card compatible, but not showing up in pfsense?

n1ko

I've been using a couple of TP-LINK TL-WN651G cards for the last nine months and they work well. They use the well regarded Atheros chipset. A quick scan of http://www.compusa.com shows them listed for $24.99.

I can give you more options in about 12 hours.

Just got one of these, version 1.5 and detects as AR5005GS in windows.

Pfsense cannot detected this, I tried with 1.2,1.2.1-RC2,2.0-ALPHA

No luck, any suggestions? I tried with in different pci-slots, putting static irq etc. My motherboard is P2B

The only thing I get in dmesg related to this are:

ath_hal: 0.9.20.3 (AR5210, AR5211, AR5212, RF5111, RF5112, RF2413, RF5413)
pci0: <bridge>at device 4.3 (no driver attached)

EDIT: seems that my motherboard (P2B, v1.02, bios 1012) doesnt support pci 2.2v wich the card requires. So even tought the machine sees the card it cant use it. Problem solved, hopefully this ends up in google and some other poor soul doesnt waste an evening like I just did :)</bridge>

wallabybob

Pfsense cannot detected this, I tried with 1.2,1.2.1-RC2,2.0-ALPHA

Interesting! I have a version 1.5 card in an older (but not as old as a P2B) mini-ITX motherboard and it works fine on 1.2.1-RC2 and a number of older builds - in fact every build I tried from the 1.2 version based on FreeBSD 6.3. (I didn't try anything earlier.)

On what evidence did you decide pfSense didn't detect the card? Here's how it shows up in my startup (I'm running 1.2.1-RC2):


ath_hal: 0.9.20.3 (AR5210, AR5211, AR5212, RF5111, RF5112, RF2413, RF5413)
 . . .
ath0: <atheros 5212="">mem 0xee000000-0xee00ffff irq 12 at device 8.0 on pci0
ath0: [ITHREAD]
ath0: using obsoleted if_watchdog interface
ath0: Ethernet address: 00:19:e0:68:31:4b
ath0: mac 7.9 phy 4.5 radio 5.6</atheros>

I'm composing this message on a P2B based system. I'll try to check out my spare TL-WN651G on the P2B later today. I can't think of any reason whay the card wouldn't be detected by pfSense, at least to the point of being reported as a ath device during startup.

wallabybob

I tried the TL-WN651G in the spare slot of my P2B. The BIOS doesn't even report it. pfSense doesn't see it it any fashion - it was just as if nothing was plugged into that slot.

I also have a Gigabyte GN-WPKG PCI card which has a Ralink 802.11G chipset. i plugged the Gigabyte card into the same slot I used for the TP-LINK card. The Gigabyte card was reported by the BIOS and the ral driver in pfSense 1.2.1-RC1. I didn't attempt to configure the Gigabyte card or use it. But there was something curious about this card as well. The system has a USB PCI card using a NEC USB 2.0 chipset. With this USB card in the system the startup would hang soon after reporting the NEC USB devices. When I removed the card with the NEC USB chipset the system started up and entered the usual configuration dialogue when booting from pfSense CD.

I suspect you may need to choose carefully when it comes to getting a wireless PCI card for the P2B. I suspect the Gigabyte GN-WPKG card has been superseded. Based on this experience I would be cautious about assuming a card with a recent chipset will work on the P2B motherboard.