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OpenBSD Installation and Upgrading Installing and upgrading OpenBSD.

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Old 13th July 2011
sd1965 sd1965 is offline
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Default OpenBSD 4.5 and wireless connection

Hello,

This is my first posting, I'll try to get all the relevant information here. Recently installed OpenBSD as part of a dual boot system with XP on an ancient Compaq R3000. It has a Broadcom wireless transmitter thing. After going though many related postings, man pages and adjusting files -- the computer can now sucessfully ping the DHCP router. The router is set to use WEP. Computer will not establish an ongoing connection for internet access. When trying to connect the computer pauses then displays "bwi0: no link...... sleeping". Internet connection works fine with XP. I haven't made any progress beyond this in the past two days and am hoping someone could point me in a useful direction to get internet connection while running OpenBSD.

A couple additional questions...

1. Would it be better to install 4.9 instead of trying to upgrade from 4.5 --> 4.6 --> 4.7 --> 4.8? Might this have the same connection problem?

2. Should I purchase a USB wireless connector and bypass the Broadcom?

Several files attached from my installation:
1. dhcpd.conf.txt.zip -- zipped print-out of dhcpd.conf
2. dhclient.conf.txt -- print-out of dhclient.conf
3. hostname.bwi0.txt -- print-out of hostname.bwi0, originally only "dhcp" but it has been added to in the hopes of making the connection (no difference whatsoever)
4. hostname.rl0.txt -- print-ot of hostname.rl0, I thought this was the wireless connection at first and so edited it
5. ping.txt -- print-out of ping to the router
6. NOTE: there are no "bridge.xxx" files... should they exist in this set-up?
Attached Files
File Type: txt dhclient.conf.txt (908 Bytes, 91 views)
File Type: txt hostname.bwi0.txt (67 Bytes, 100 views)
File Type: txt hostname.rl0.txt (40 Bytes, 80 views)
File Type: txt ping.txt (556 Bytes, 61 views)
File Type: zip dhcpd.conf.txt.zip (540 Bytes, 57 views)
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Old 13th July 2011
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jggimi jggimi is offline
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On upgrading:

1) OpenBSD 4.5 has not been supported for more than a year.
2) New admins are often nervous about upgrades, but tools like sysmerge(8) make it very easy to do. Those of us who use -current are upgrading constantly.

On your problem with your bwi(4) NIC:

1) Consider that your BSSID (nwid) and your dhclient.conf host-name are the same. This may confuse your router's DHCP service. You might try a default dhclient.conf before making changes like that.

2) Test with an open, unprotected network, to ensure that something in your nwkey is not the problem. Commonly hexidecimal (0-9 and A-F) representations are accidently keyed as ASCII characters, or vice versa. If you can connect to your wireless router with WEP disabled, but cannot with WEP enabled, you will know this is your problem.

Bridge files are used to describe bridged networks, which I don't think you'll need, from what you've provided. Without a clearer picture of your topology, I can only guess that you have a single NIC intended for use, bwi0, and your wired NIC, rl0, has nothing plugged into it.
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Old 13th July 2011
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sd1965 View Post
Computer will not establish an ongoing connection for internet access. When trying to connect the computer pauses then displays "bwi0: no link...... sleeping".
In addition to jggimi's comments, I see that there have been changes made to the code base of the bwi(4) driver since OpenBSD 4.5 was released. In particular, changes have been made to:
  • src/sys/dev/ic/bwi.c
  • src/sys/dev/pci/if_bwi_pci.c
...relating to ACPI suspend/resume. The firmware however still is at version 1.4.

Whether or not these changes (& manual installation of the firmware...) will lead to a working configuration on your hardware is unknown. Given that OpenBSD 4.5 is no longer supported, you should either update or simply install a fresh copy of OpenBSD 4.9.
Quote:
Internet connection works fine with XP.
Microsoft frequently enters nondisclosure agreements with vendors, & prominent vendors will send staff to Redmond at some point during product development to finalize various issues. The point here is that both sides have a contractual agreement in which they use to ensure that drivers do or do not work, & details of what was done to make software work remain confidential.

The OpenBSD project doesn't work on nondisclosure agreements (whereas some Linux drivers are products of NDA's with selected developers...). In the OpenBSD world, drivers are based upon freely available document or from whatever can be discerned through reverse engineering. The result is that wireless card support may be lacking in comparison to other projects which benefit from NDA contracts.
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Old 14th July 2011
sd1965 sd1965 is offline
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Just wanted to say a quick "Thank You" for both of your replies. I have not yet had enough time to try any of the suggestions. Schedule permitting maybe this evening. A complete 4.9 install is tempting.
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Old 17th July 2011
sd1965 sd1965 is offline
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Four days of fiddling and the mystery has been solved... the "wpa-psk" command(?) was needed to create an encrypted password the router was expecting. I re-installed OpenBSD 4.5 and made sure the nwid and host names are different. Not sure if that was contributing but it's possible. Now on to installing 4.9!

Thank You both JGGIMI and OCICAT for your input.

sd
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Old 17th July 2011
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jggimi jggimi is offline
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Now that you have discovered you were not using WEP, but using WPA or WPA 2, you will find that that setting up the encryption will have changed, and simplified, since 4.5.
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