Hello Jun,

    Thanks for maintaining your "Mini-howto on Flashing Intersil Prism 
Chipsets" website.

    Several days ago (Jul 29, 2005) I purchased a new SMC2532W-B 
wireless card.
    This card come with the PRISM3 chipset.

    I installed SuSE 9.3 onto an old Toshiba 2250CDT PII laptop
    and configured hostap (that came with SuSE).
    Everything appeared to be working as shown by ifconfig and iwconfig 
and dmesg and /var/log/messages.

    On another laptop, I set up kismet which picked up several networks 
but NOT my hostap access point!!!
    Seems like there were no AP beacons being sent out.

    And I could not ping the AP from the client.
    The log on the client showed

eth0: New link status: Connected (0001)
eth0: New link status: AP Out of Range (0004)
eth0: New link status: Ap In Range (0005)
eth0: New link status: AP Out of Range (0004)
eth0: New link status: Ap In Range (0005)
... above two lines repeating every several seconds.

    I fiddled for a day or two without success. I even sent an e-mail to 
SMC support.
    I asked about the firmware version. This is what they said.

>Dear  John,
>Thank you for choosing SMC Networks, Inc.
>In the website we do not post firmware for the adapter. Moreover, we offer
>support only for the adapter's drivers / utility and not for the firmware.
>Regards,
>SMC Networks Technical Support
>1-800-SMC-4YOU,
>techsupport@smc.com

    Fortunately I found your website and downloaded 1.8.4 station 
firmware and flashed my card.
    The original firmware was 1.8.2

    Now everything works. Kismet sees AP beacons and I can ping the AP 
from the client.

    Thanks again for your support.

John
selmys@27rutland.ca
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