Some time ago I posted about what I had needed to do to get Solaris installed on my laptop. Well, the install went fine, but rather what extra bits I needed. Some folks in Sun have been working on a driver for the centrino wireless adapter, but up to now I’ve never managed to get it working. This was pissing me off, so I decided to look into the problem properly.
The root of the problem was fairly obvious in the end. The radio wasn’t transmitting. The little radio button at the side didn’t do anything, its mapped to some specific windows driver in xp I imagine. The BIOS however did say that wireless was enabled, but it didn’t work. Snooping around some linux websites I came across the linux fsam7400 kernel module that would turn on the networking. This module is specific to my laptop, an Fjuitsu-Siemens Amilo M 7400. However a linux kernel module is useless to me in Solaris!
The module basically flips some bits in the BIOS. I thought about trying to work out how to port it to solaris. I think I understand what some of the more straightforward commands do, however working out how to do ioremap nevermind ‘__asm__ __volatile__’ was beyond my grasp. And the people that I would usually go and pester had gone home for the weekend! I suppose it would be possible to do this with mdb; I can navigate a bit in mdb, but finding exactly where to poke in the bios would take a lot of learning. Especially without having people around to ask naive questions to!
It then occurred to me that the BIOS setting for wireless being enabled was plainly lying. Perhaps where was a BIOS patch? Typical… Ten minutes later I had a little wireless light on the box running solaris and was able to get to connect to my access point! Success!
The next lesson I learnt today was ‘don’t half apply patch 118919-06’. If you do you’ll end up with an unreadable pkcs11.conf file. To reapply the patch you need to go back to old style patching with ‘patchadd -t’. The patch removal was initially aborted (I was testing something), and so only the SUNWcsu package was patched, you need to invoke patchadd with the -t option so that it will check all the packages in the patch to see if the patch is applied and if not apply the patch to them. The patch itself is fine by the way!
After getting the crypto stuff sorted out, I was able to log in to Sun through our Ipsec based secure login secure access service. Now thankfully I no longer have to use windows and Vpn to log onto SWAN. But its Friday night, and time to stop working.
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