MirBSD manpage: an(4)
AN(4) BSD Programmer's Manual AN(4)
an - Aironet Communications 4500/4800 IEEE 802.11DS wireless network
adapter
an* at pcmcia? function ?
an* at pci? dev ? function ?
an* at isapnp?
The an driver provides support for the Aironet Communications 4500, 4800
(aka Cisco 340), and Cisco 350 IEEE 802.11 Direct Sequence wireless net-
work adapters. This includes the ISA, PCI, and PCMCIA varieties. The 4500
series adapters operate at 1 and 2Mbps while the 4800 and 350 series 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 program-
ming 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 PCMCIA support.
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 confi-
guration and the NIC's switch settings must agree. PCI cards require no
switch settings of any kind and will be automatically probed and at-
tached.
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 re-
ceive 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 BSS operation
with an SSID of "". In this mode, stations can communicate among each
other without the aid of an access point. To join a service set, the
driver must be set for BSS mode using the ancontrol(8) utility.
For more information on configuring this device, see ifconfig(8).
an%d: init failed The Aironet card failed to come 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.
arp(4), intro(4), isapnp(4), netintro(4), pci(4), pcmcia(4), wi(4),
hostname.if(5), ancontrol(8), ifconfig(8)
The an device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 4.0. OpenBSD support was
added in OpenBSD 2.7.
The an driver was written by Bill Paul <wpaul@ee.columbia.edu> and ported
to OpenBSD by
Michael Shalayeff <mickey@openbsd.org>.
MirBSD #10-current September 10, 1999 1