Linksys WMP54G/ Ralink RT2561 Wireless help????

[southpaw]

Hello all,
This is sort of a continuation thread for me in the quest for bottleneck-free internet speed...
"Here"
...As you can see, my patience is wearing incredibly thin with this and so I've decided move forward with an alternate option,
GO WIRELESS!

So I have, and since I have wiped my temper slate clean I prepare myself for a whole new set of obstacles . So without further ado, heres my status...

I have installed a Linksys WMP54G v4 wireless PCI card in an available PCI slot on my Dell Dimension 4500. After doing a litte mandatory research I found that the driver already comes with the kernel in FreeBSD 6.1 RELEASE. So I got rid of everything that I didn't need and recompiled my kernel with these options left in;

device        wlan
device        wlan_wep
device        wlan_ccmp
device        wlan_tkip
device        ral

Of course I then ran through the motions (make, build..., install..., reboot).
However when I ran "ifconfig ral0" I got this;

ifconfig: interface ral0 does not exist

So, I then checked "dmesg | grep ral0" and I got nothing (I also tried a different number with the said device i.e. ral1, ral2, etc.., no dice).
Then I figured maybe it needs to be loaded as a module, although unlikely, I tried it anyway but all I got there was;

module_register: module pccard/ral already exists!

So I checked "pciconf -lv" to make sure the card is seen;

vendor  = `Ralink Technology, Corp`
class  = network
none2@pci2:1:0: class=0x028000 card=0x00551737 chip=0x03011814 rev=0x00 hdr=0x00

So that pretty much brings me up to date. Now my question, what the hell am I doing wrong or, what have I missed???

Your help is always appreciated, thanx

[Dapper Dan]

Never used FreeBSD with this card but do use it regularly with CentOS. With the Ralink drivers it gets configured as ra0 rather than ral0 or ral1. Maybe it's ra(one) and not ra(L)? Don't know if that helps any with FreeBSD but thought I'd throw it out just in case...

[southpaw]

Yeah I tried that but I still get nothing
I've even tried, as someone else suggested to me somewhere else, to use "NDISgen", as it is included with the 6.x series branch. So I did however, after converting the .SYS and .INF files as suggested, I can't seem to find the appropriate modules to load.

On that note, I also seem to be having much trouble locating decent documentation regarding "NDIS" under "FreeBSD" and such. The man page is very vague and most forum searches turn up 'nil on post conversion of driver modules and such

[onlinebacon]

I use a very similair card

I do;

dmesg | grep ral0
ifconfig ral0 inet <ip adress> netmask <subnet mask>
then dhclient ral0

(then whatever you need to do for security, loading kernel modules and making a /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file).

It picks up flawlessly with my machine, which is why it is odd it doesnt for yours...

[southpaw]

Yeah I tried all that but all I get is "ral0 does not exist" or "ndis0 does not exsist"... I've been trying to do some serious backtracking to see if I'm overlooking something but I haven't been able to find any mistakes on my part

[southpaw]

Could someone help me clarify something? What exactly does it mean when I try to load a module like:

kldload if_ndis

...and as a result I get this:

kldload: can't load if_ndis: File exists

??? ???

[onlinebacon]

it means you are trying to load a module called if_ndis.

[onlinebacon]

Try running the commans dmesg | grep more, and see if it gets detected, and where it gets detected.

[southpaw]

Okay, after going through a bunch of headaches with ralink's proprietary driver RT61 and serialmonkey's rt2x00 driver, I finally switched to the FreeBSD provided "ndisgen". So, I converted the .INF .sys files, copied the .sys to /boot/kernel and added the files to /boot/loader.conf and this is what I get upon reboot...

NDIS: open file /compat/ndis/rt2561.bin failed: 2

What does this mean???