an(4)
NAME
- an - Aironet Communications 4500/4800 wireless network
- adapter driver
SYNOPSIS
To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following lines in your kernel configuration file: device an device wlan Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following line in loader.conf(5): if_an_load="YES"
DESCRIPTION
- The an driver provides support for Aironet Communications
- 4500 and 4800
wireless network adapters and variants, including the fol - lowing:
+o Aironet Communications 4500 and 4800 series
+o Cisco Aironet 340 and 350 series
+o Xircom Wireless Ethernet Adapter- Support for these devices include the ISA, PCI and PCMCIA
- varieties. The
Aironet 4500 series adapters operate at 1 and 2Mbps while - the Aironet
4800 series and Cisco adapters can operate at 1, 2, 5.5 and - 11Mbps. The
ISA, PCI and PCMCIA devices are all based on the same core - PCMCIA modules
and all have the same programming interface, however unlike - the Lucent
WaveLAN/IEEE cards, the ISA and PCI cards appear to the host - as normal
ISA and PCI devices and do not require any PCCARD support. - The PCMCIA Aironet cards require PC Card support, including
- the kernel
pccard(4) driver. ISA cards can either be configured to use - ISA Plug and
Play or to use a particular I/O address and IRQ by properly - setting the
DIP switches on the board. (The default switch setting is - for Plug and
Play.) The an driver has Plug and Play support and will - work in either
configuration, however when using a hard-wired I/O address - and IRQ, the
driver configuration and the NIC's switch settings must - agree. PCI cards
require no switch settings of any kind and will be automati - cally probed
and attached. - All host/device interaction with the Aironet cards is via
- programmed I/O.
The Aironet devices support 802.11 and 802.3 frames, power - management,
BSS (infrastructure) and IBSS (ad-hoc) operation modes. The - an driver
encapsulates all IP and ARP traffic as 802.11 frames, howev - er it can
receive either 802.11 or 802.3 frames. Transmit speed is - selectable
between 1Mbps, 2Mbps, 5.5Mbps, 11Mbps or "auto" (the NIC au - tomatically
chooses the best speed). - By default, the an driver configures the Aironet card for
- infrastructure
operation. - For more information on configuring this device, see ifcon
- fig(8).
DIAGNOSTICS
- an%d: init failed The Aironet card failed to become ready
- after an initialization command was issued.
- an%d: failed to allocate %d bytes on NIC The driver was un
- able to allocate memory for transmit frames in the NIC's on-board RAM.
- an%d: device timeout The Aironet card failed to generate an
- interrupt to
acknowledge a transmit command.
SEE ALSO
HISTORY
The an device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 4.0.
AUTHORS
- The an driver was written by Bill Paul
- <wpaul@ee.columbia.edu>.
- BSD July 16, 2005