Stock A1200 networking

[alexatkin]

Sanautil, thanks for the tip.  Well, at least it IS seeing the card but shouldnt it have found the access point and be transmitting/receiving to that?

Device 'networks/prism2.device' (version 1.6), unit 0
QueryFormat: 0, DeviceLevel: 0
Address field size: 48 bits, Maximum transfer unit: 1500 bytes
Speed: 11000000 bps, HardwareType: Ethernet
Current addr: 00:00:00:00:00:00, Default addr: [HIDDEN]
Packets received: 0, Packets sent: 0
Bad Data: 0, Overruns: 0
Unknown packets received: 0, Reconfigurations: 0
Last start: --
Special stats:
(1/0) Bad multicasts: 0
(1/1) Retries: 0
(1/2) Underruns: 0

I blanked out the default addr just for paranoias sake but it was correct for the card.

Anyway im using the A1200 with the intention I might at least be able to increast the FAST RAM a little at some point, preferably drop an accelerator in at least an 030.  Its not a priority at the moment though, plenty of high-tech stuff I want this christmas.  :roll: The A600 would be more of a problem as im not sure where the hard drive bracket is and id have to use the external floppy as I only have the one internal one that works and its in the A1200.  Not to mention why use the slower machine when some of the games I will be transferring will be AGA. :-P

Being able to get stuff straight off Aminet onto the Amiga and being able to access my PCs DVD-ROM drive though is VERY useful especially as it shouldnt cost me a penny to do.

[ncafferkey]

alexatkin wrote:
Sanautil, thanks for the tip.  Well, at least it IS seeing the card but shouldnt it have found the access point and be transmitting/receiving to that?

How do you know it hasn't? ;-) Did you set the wireless parameters with SetPrism2Defaults?

[alexatkin]

Because it says packets 0 which would implies it hasnt even tried to connect. I DID include "SetPrism2Defaults SSID LCARS" in user-startup just to be sure, it didnt seem to make any difference.  This card is DEINFATELY in the MAC allowed list on the Access Point and works fine in my laptop.  Strangely another prism2 card I have isnt being detected by the A1200 at all, although that one could have developed a fault as part of the card is snapped (but seemingly just one side of the onboard antenna and the leds light up).

It seems to me that prism2.device isnt initialising the card properly. If I do "sanautil device prism2.device online" I get:

OnLine command failed -- Error: Bad state
WireError: Unit is not configured

If I do "sanautil device prism2.device config" and then the above, I get the same error.  If I do "sanautil device prism2.device config address=[the cards mac address]", it still does the same.  Clearly the card ISNT initialising, but im not sure what is failing or what I can do about it.

If it was Linux I would check the syslog but Amiga?  Is there any way to get more debug information out of AmiTCP?

Anothing thing is the Reset patch seems to be working as I tested with it disabled in user-startup and the card didnt fire up until I plugged it in AFTER booting then.  Incidentally, do you need CardPatch AND CardReset?  CardReset mentioned needing CardPatch but it didnt say anything more than that.  I dont think its related to the problem though, I have both listed in user-startup and card is clearly initialising on some level, just not for AmiTCP.

Is it possibly something stupid like I need a newer version of setpatch?  Other libraries AmiTCP depends on?  This IS just a basic WB3.1 install.  I think I might try softbooting kickstart 3.1 and see if it makes any difference, but I will have barely any RAM left then for testing.

[edit] Kickstart 3.1 did not make any difference whatsoever.  :cry:

[ncafferkey]

alexatkin wrote:
Because it says packets 0 which would implies it hasnt even tried to connect. I DID include "SetPrism2Defaults SSID LCARS" in user-startup just to be sure, it didnt seem to make any difference.  This card is DEINFATELY in the MAC allowed list on the Access Point and works fine in my laptop.  Strangely another prism2 card I have isnt being detected by the A1200 at all, although that one could have developed a fault as part of the card is snapped (but seemingly just one side of the onboard antenna and the leds light up).

The card can associate with the access point without the packets sent/received stats being affected. However, if you ran sanautil after the interface is suppposed to be online, Last Start should show a time.

It seems to me that prism2.device isnt initialising the card properly. If I do "sanautil device prism2.device online" I get:

OnLine command failed -- Error: Bad state
WireError: Unit is not configured

If I do "sanautil device prism2.device config" and then the above, I get the same error.  If I do "sanautil device prism2.device config address=[the cards mac address]", it still does the same.  Clearly the card ISNT initialising, but im not sure what is failing or what I can do about it.

This is a limitation of sanautil. After you configure the card with sanautil, sanautil closes the driver and exits, and the card becomes unconfigured again. The only way around this is to keep the driver open, eg. by stopping "sanautil status" before it finishes by typing in the shell window.

If it was Linux I would check the syslog but Amiga?  Is there any way to get more debug information out of AmiTCP?

Anothing thing is the Reset patch seems to be working as I tested with it disabled in user-startup and the card didnt fire up until I plugged it in AFTER booting then.  Incidentally, do you need CardPatch AND CardReset?  CardReset mentioned needing CardPatch but it didnt say anything more than that.  I dont think its related to the problem though, I have both listed in user-startup and card is clearly initialising on some level, just not for AmiTCP.

Is it possibly something stupid like I need a newer version of setpatch?  Other libraries AmiTCP depends on?  This IS just a basic WB3.1 install.  I think I might try softbooting kickstart 3.1 and see if it makes any difference, but I will have barely any RAM left then for testing.

[edit] Kickstart 3.1 did not make any difference whatsoever.  :cry:

I think the problem is in the configuration of AmiTCP. It gives the error "no such interface", but I think it would say something like "can't open device" if there were a problem with the driver.

In my AmiTCP configuration, I use the number in the interface name in interfaces, so I'd have:

wlan0 dev=devs:networks/prism2.device

My actual line is:

eth1 DEV=DEVS:networks/prism2.device UNIT=0

Are you sure it isn't something silly like the AMITCP assign pointing to the wrong place? You could use SnoopDOS to check for problems opening libraies or files.

[alexatkin]

Well, after installing AmiTCP 4 and a little manual configuration, everything is working! :-D So it seems prism2 does not work with AmiTCP 3.  I began to suspect as much especially when ncafferkey posted and I noticed it was an AmiTCP 4 configuration.  Also the fact that the AmiTCP 3 installer doesnt configure things correctly and 3 is a beta, I was just beginning to think (or at least hope) something was wrong with it.

Anyway, now with AmiTCP 4 I got NFS to mount my ADF directory on my Linux server and it worked first time (which for NFS on ANY system is bloody amazing).  Im getting ~96k/sec copying ADF files to the Amiga over NFS, I peaked at 116k/sec over FTP copying a large lha file (averaging about 105k/sec) to my PC using AmiTCPs built-in FTP server, which doesnt seem too shoddy for a stock A1200 especially as these are both hard drive transfers.  RAM disk I suspect will be even faster still.

I am having issues with "RPC call timed out" but I guess its to be expected a stock A1200 is just a tad too slow and NFS is a pain in the arse even on PC.  Unfortunately smbfs just gave me a "software failure" and the main Samba package looks a tad large. I already lost 50% of the RAM on the A1200 from setting up AmiTCP and tidying up the icons a bit, and thats after moving ENV: over to the hard disk (temporary measure I hope until I manage to get some FAST RAM somehow but it saved me about 300k RAM at the cost of some speed).  

Incidentally, I was doing some tests in WinUAE and was wonder exactly what data can FAST RAM contain when you have an accelerator?  The reason I ask is I tested reading a large directory on my PC in WinUAE with emulated 128MB FAST RAM and it couldnt cope as it exhausted all the CHIP RAM.  I presume it was because it was not patched to use the FAST RAM correctly or are there limitations?  I dont think WinUAE emulates accelerators as such so the memory mapping is probably not right?

Anyway, thanks everyone for their help.  I think its absolutely astonishing that a stock A1200 can connect to a wireless network nomatter what speed it does.  It really show the flexibility of the Amiga and the reason we love it so much even now.  It would take a hugely customised Linux-from-scratch build to achieve the same thing on an old PC with even twice as much RAM as the A1200 has and THAT would need an MMU.

[Daedalus]

alexatkin wrote:

Incidentally, I was doing some tests in WinUAE and was wonder exactly what data can FAST RAM contain when you have an accelerator?  The reason I ask is I tested reading a large directory on my PC in WinUAE with emulated 128MB FAST RAM and it couldnt cope as it exhausted all the CHIP RAM.  I presume it was because it was not patched to use the FAST RAM correctly or are there limitations?  I dont think WinUAE emulates accelerators as such so the memory mapping is probably not right?

There is no real emulation to an accelerator as such - they're basically transparent for the majority of things, so UAE set to the processor and Z3 memory the accelerator has should appear the very same to the software running on it. I suspect you were running out of chip ram because you're using a native screenmode in UAE for Workbench, and opening the large directory would involve a large number of icons, which Workbench puts in chip ram by default. The best solution as I see it would be to use graphics card emulation through Picasso96, making the UAE Amiga use the RTG memory that you give it in the prefs, but it's a while since I've toyed with it so I'm a bit hazy on the specifics...