| [H/W] C850/870W WLAN card Hello all,
I was wondering if anyone has a Cisco 850W or 870W and can tell me which mini-pci WLAN card works for the router. From the picture I found online (attached), it appears to use an atheros chip. I tried an atheros (AR5002) card I had, and the router does detect the "1 802.11 Radio" interface when it boots up, but i get an error about not being able to set the correct power levels.
Thanks all! |
|
| I figured it out, my wireless card (AR5213) actually works. To get rid of the invalid power level error, just change the radio country code in rommon priv mode. |
|
|
|
| reply to rk222
Congrats. Can you provide the full make / model of the wireless card, and the exact configs
you had to input to get it to work? Never know if someone else wouldn't find it handy.
Regards |
|
| reply to rk222
I took the wifi card out of an old sony laptop, model # of the card is T60H786-03. I assume any card with an AR5212 family chip works (mine is an AR5213-A).
Surprisingly once you attach the WLAN card, the ISR shows up as its wireless equivalent.
Cisco 857W (MPC8272) processor (revision 0x300) with 59392K/6144K bytes of memory.
Processor board ID XXXXXXXXXX
MPC8272 CPU Rev: Part Number 0xC, Mask Number 0x10
4 FastEthernet interfaces
1 ATM interface
1 802.11 Radio
128K bytes of non-volatile configuration memory.
20480K bytes of processor board System flash (Intel Strataflash)
The next thing I did was reprogram the EEPROM of my AR5213A using ath_tools. (not sure if this is required)
EEPROM contents can be found on this thread »Cisco 871 Questions or a quick google search.
Data from 0x80 to 0x9F was exactly the same on my card. 0xA0-0xA4 defines the controller type, hardware version and parts number and 0xB0 - B5 defines the serial number.
I still got the same error after reprogramming the EEPROM so I went ahead and reprogrammed the cookie of the ISR using the "priv" command in rommon. After I changed bytes 0x7b-0x7c from FFFF to 0000(America) and rebooted, everything seems to work. Too bad the range I have on the wireless is __. I guess the next step for me is to buy some antennas for it and figure out if I want to drill holes in the plastic case or find some other convenient way to attached antennas to the router. I also wonder if the 850/870 series can use the 802.11ABG cards that are used in the 1800 series.
Config wise - just the standard stuff using IOS, or use CCP if you want.
On another note, its kind of sad that the newer 860/880 series use daughterboards for WLAN, and the non wireless models dont have the connectors for the daughterboards soldered on. So much harder to add wireless functionality compared to the older 850/870 series. =/
And yes, I know it would simpler if I just bought a cheap access point and connected it to the router. |
|
| reply to rk222
said by rk222 :And yes, I know it would simpler if I just bought a cheap access point and connected it to the router.
But not half as fun modding it, right 
Regards |
|
| reply to rk222
tried with another ar5212 (cm9-gp) card without reprogramming eeprom and it works fine. Guess the only thing necessary is to modify the cookie. Sadly, the card supports abg, but a is unusable on the router. Guess support for a is only in the IOS of the 1800 series.
Pretty cheap upgrade for people who wants to change their 850/870 series to its "W" counterpart. |
|
