FreeBSD Man Pages

if_an(4)

NAME

     an -- Aironet Communications 4500/4800 wireless network adapter driver

SYNOPSIS

     device an
     device wlan

DESCRIPTION

     The an driver provides support for Aironet Communications 4500 and 4800
     wireless network adapters and variants, including the following:

	   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 automatically 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, however it can
     receive either 802.11 or 802.3 frames.  Transmit speed is selectable
     between 1Mbps, 2Mbps, 5.5Mbps, 11Mbps or "auto" (the NIC automatically
     chooses the best speed).

     By default, the an driver configures the Aironet card for infrastructure
     operation.

     For more information on configuring this device, see ifconfig(8).

DIAGNOSTICS

     an%d: init failed	The Aironet card failed to become ready after an ini-
     tialization command was issued.

     an%d: failed to allocate %d bytes on NIC  The driver was unable to allo-
     cate 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

FreeBSD 5.4		      September 10, 1999		   FreeBSD 5.4

SPONSORED LINKS