[IdOp]

Originally Posted by daemonfowl

you mean 192.168.1.1/24 ..

Actually, I did mean it with .0. My understanding is that that is the notation conventionally used for the network, or even more simply just 192.168.1/24. On that network the IP addresses available for computers are 192.168.1.1, 192.168.1.2, ... 192.168.1.254. Your gateway is the first, your laptop is being assigned the second. For that network as a whole, the last octet doesn't matter (all are valid) and would usually be written as 0 or omitted.

... I installed both .. NetBSD is installed on 16g usb flash for testing and if I overcome the prob I'm installing it to a spare 120g disk ..
I dont't have a dual OS machine ..

OK, not quite dual boot (unless you count the flash drive too), but they are running on the same computer, which is what I was after.

Here is the OpenBSD output of ifconfig -a :

Thanks, so for wpi0 the info there looks consistent with the NetBSD output, to me. Your results with OpenBSD then indicate that physically the wireless device is capable of working well.

* no route to host when installing via pkgsrc (persistent prob since I installed NBSD)

Sometimes this is due to an ARP problem. (ARP is used when an OS wants to send to a known local IP address but it needs to find the link level address (e.g., MAC) to send the packet to.) But if your computer couldn't, for example, resolve the wireless MAC address of the gateway, then how could you get to some sites? So maybe the problem is not local to you.

* I can ftp connect to all NetBSD mirrors via OpenBSD .. whereas on NetBSD I cannot except the jp.netbsd.org server ..
is it an ftp conf issue ?? or an ipv6 one ?? but then why was jp.netbsd reachable ??

* yes the prob is persistent .. whenever I use pkgsrc it successfully fetches one or two pkgs but most of the time fails to get others ending up in a timeout ..

Ah, so you do get somewhere, but then it bogs down or dies. That is new info.

* even the "fr/se/es/.netbsd.org" servers fail me .. so it is not a us.mirror problem ..

good to know

* lol .. yes from official website I downloaded then compiled lynx .. the only successful pkg so far ..
.. ping and host in a while ... need to reboot on netflash :-)

These sound worth persuing, including browsing around a lot with lynx. The question here is, is any site really that reliably accessable? I know you said the japanese mirror was ... but how much did you use it?

I'm definitely puzzled by all this, but one hypothesis is that maybe the NetBSD wireless driver is just not reliable in your environment. My own experience is with the Ralink ral(4) driver, and on that one at least it seems the OpenBSD driver is, currently, clearly of higher quality. But for wpi this is nothing yet but speculation trying to find something that fits the observations, and maybe it will turn out false.