Cisco 1200 AP's and Cisco a/b/g cards with Compaq nc6000

[Michelle_46]

We are having problems with people finding the tree while trying to log into Novell on the nc6000 using the a/b/g cards (laptop is using Windows 2000). When we remove the card and put an older Cisco 802.1b card in, the login process works fine. Anyone else have the same problems or does anyone know the reason why?

[Bill Malmquist]

Does it ever find the tree? If it does eventually find it, it may be that the new WiFi card is set to scan all available channels and bands before selecting the best one and you're just experiencing a delay because of it. Most cards you can tell to go straight to the proper band and channel. If it never finds the tree, maybe check the WEP setting on the new card, or maybe the card is NOT scanning and is locked into a channel or band that is not applicable to your AP. The older card should always work because it has already been configured to your AP.

[Michelle_46]

No, it never finds the tree. You can take the g card out after the error, put the B card in, log in, and then switch cards again. The G card will then find the AP and an Ip will be assigned to it, but will never be able to log in using the formal Novell login process.

[Philip Doragh]

The problem is that the utility that tells the WLAN device what network to connect to does not start until the user logs in...thus you are unable to use the WLAN to log in to the domain and run any login scripts or the like. This will change soon with the next client update which will support login time support.

[Michelle_46]

Thanks. I guess there are other issues cropping up with the G cards that don't make sense. The main issues are around the high number of error packets, and the flakiness of the file services. I have always found that if I degrade the card to .b, or authenticate to .b, I don't see the flakiness. By flakiness I mean, when you double-click a file in Windows Explorer, it can take several seconds to highlight the filename, then the app launches but errors out with "can't open file" type messages; trying again is usually successful
- file saving often errors out with the status bar at 100% with a message like "file access denied"
- The Atheros client utility shows more frames received with errors than without; in the early stages of booting, the errors can be 10x the number of good packets
- updated Atheros drivers and multiple Netware client versions have been tried with no success
- forcing the card to run at 802.11b speeds or connecting to a "b" radio is better, but still sluggish (at least you don't seem to error out)

[Bill Malmquist]

sounds like a speed issue, whereby the new card is running way faster than the AP, and/or it's associated switch/router can handle and is bouncing back packets. You may have to throttle down the card (stay on 'b') until the AP or it's associated hardware can get upgraded and 'up to speed' (OK, pun intended)...

[Eric Culling]

We have a similar issue at our location. We have the NC6000s with both Atheros W400 and W500 MiniPCI cards installed with the latest drivers (3.1.1.54 - from 4/18/04) and latest version of the ACU (same version #). We run Cisco 1200 WLAPs. We seem to experience a very high number of "Frames Received With Errors" when accessing the ACU-Diagnostics-Advanced Statistics. Our main problem is that when trying to login to our Active Directory Domain, sometimes the login script will run and map all of our user's network drives, but most of the time it will not run at all. We have tried almost all of the software fixes we can think of (slowing card down, changing NIC binding orders, etc. etc.). Is there a setting we can change on the WLAN cards or the WLAPs to help resolve the high number of frame errors?
Our security is a 128-bit static WEP.