RT8187 support?
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Hi!
Ah, I ordered 3x usb adapters with Ralink chipsets, but got ones with Realtek. Great!
Oh well.
It seems that there is some kind of support for Realtek, but in my case urtw was never loaded.
I get this with 11-03-10 snapshot:
Any ideas?
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bump
Please, any comments would be appreciated! I'm a newb with BSD :|
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It may just be that the driver doesn't fully support that chipset, or the chip is slightly different in some way than the driver expects. Hard to say for sure.
Unfortunately when it comes to driver bugs there isn't much we can do for most of them. Can you try to install a FreeBSD 8.1 ISO somewhere and connect that device to see if you get the same errors? If you do, it might be worth opening a PR with FreeBSD to address the driver issue.
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It may just be that the driver doesn't fully support that chipset, or the chip is slightly different in some way than the driver expects. Hard to say for sure.
Unfortunately when it comes to driver bugs there isn't much we can do for most of them. Can you try to install a FreeBSD 8.1 ISO somewhere and connect that device to see if you get the same errors? If you do, it might be worth opening a PR with FreeBSD to address the driver issue.
Managed to install FreeBSD in a VM and got an identical error. Which is weird as other people with the same chipset (though different card) made it work. The cards have the same VID & PID, so I really have no idea why it's not working for me.
I could not debug more, as my FreeBSD knowledge is non existent, and I found the whole FreeBSD 8.1 experience on reminiscent of say, RedHat circa '98, only much worse. The default CD installation didn't even set up TAB command completion, nor MC or even wget, never mind a working X environment.
Ah… I'll try the DVD release, see how that goes.
If I can't get the adapters to work, would you please recommend me a Linux based router closest to pfSense?
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It might be helpful to have a bit more context to the error messages. Please post the output from the dmesg command. (From the pfSense web GUI: Diagnostics -> Command Prompt, type dmesg in the Command box then click the Execute button.)
If I can't get the adapters to work, would you please recommend me a Linux based router closest to pfSense?
I ditched Smoothwall a few years back because of the poor state of the wireless support. I haven't seen any reason to even think about going back.
If the wireless adapters were supposed to be Ralink chipset based I think in many places you would be entitled to a refund or exchange. Failing that, where I live its possible to get USB devices with supported Ralink chipsets for under US$20 (after conversion). Do you expect the Realtek devices to act as Access Points? That isn't supported by the urtw driver (see the man page at http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=urtw&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+8.1-RELEASE&format=html).
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It might be helpful to have a bit more context to the error messages. Please post the output from the dmesg command. (From the pfSense web GUI: Diagnostics -> Command Prompt, type dmesg in the Command box then click the Execute button.)
IIRC my dmesg didn't yield any more info than what I already posted that, but I'll try the FreeBSD DVD this evening.
If I can't get the adapters to work, would you please recommend me a Linux based router closest to pfSense?
I ditched Smoothwall a few years back because of the poor state of the wireless support. I haven't seen any reason to even think about going back.
IDK about routers, but regular old linux has great wifi support, RT8187 is working nicely there. If all else fails, well, I guess I could learn routing on linux from the console :)
If the wireless adapters were supposed to be Ralink chipset based I think in many places you would be entitled to a refund or exchange. Failing that, where I live its possible to get USB devices with supported Ralink chipsets for under US$20 (after conversion). Do you expect the Realtek devices to act as Access Points? That isn't supported by the urtw driver (see the man page at http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=urtw&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+8.1-RELEASE&format=html).
Ah, they were supposed to be Ralink, but the shop is mum about my complaint. The cheapest Ralink USB with RPSMA device was ~$40 US but I can't find them here anymore. I also got 3 of these Realtek ones I have no other use for :/
I could live with just station support as I could ditch the long antenna cables and switch to USB ones, which is the main motivator behind this exercise :)
I tested a 10m USB cable (built in powered repeater), and it's working great, getting real USB 2.0 speeds, more than enough for any wireless needs. I'll just mount the USB wifi's directly to the antennas, yay! -
OMG, installed FreeBSD again, and was trying to grab some packages (just MC), postinstall with sysinstall, from the main FTP site, after hanging for like 20min (networking is working, I get to choose packages, and it even starts downloading at blazing fast 50kB/s)…and it managed to segfault. This is under VmWare on a win7 machine that has ~30days uptime.
Either my VmWare turned bad suddenly (win and different distros of linux working normally) or IDK.NVM, I'll take this to a general FreeBSD board, or more likely just go and use Linux.
BTW checked dmesg and yeah, same info as in the screenshot I posted in OP.
