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DOS wireless - Orinoco Gold

O

Ole Juul

Veteran Member
Joined
Aug 15, 2008
Messages
3,982
Location
Coalmont, BC, Canada
I want to try setting up a wireless card in DOS. Does anybody have any experience with this?

I have an Agere Systems packet driver for DOS (Varient 1, Version 6.12) but am not familiar with what chipset that needs so am confused about the cards offered these days. I've found various ones on eBay and they talk about a Hermes chipset. There is much hype about the "Orinoco Gold" and "wardriving" etc, so I'm having a bit of a problem sorting this out.

Here is one of the cheapest ones I've found. Would that work?
 
What do you care about wardriving anyway? Are you going around town looking for WEP encrypted routers to hack into?

Any of the Lucent Wavelan/Orinoco 16 bit PCMCIA cards have DOS packet drivers for them, you just need the original software and some card services software to setup the card. I prefer the Silver cards since they are cheap and the difference in WEP encryption doesn't matter (bronze is no WEP, silver is 64 bit, Gold is 128 bit, all are easily crackable).

I purchased 4 boxed cards with software last week (plus have a stack of Wavelans anyway) for under $10 shipped from ebay (1 Orinoco and 3 Wavelans) so I have the software if you need it (Works with Macs as well).

Come to think of it the one Bronze card I have worked like a charm on my Amiga 1200 last time I tried it.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Ole, I had no idea that Coalmont was full of Wifi hotspots... :)
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Much like Starbucks in the USA and elsewhere, by law every town and city in Canada must have at least one Tim Horton doughnut franchise for every 100 residents, with free wifi of course.
 
MikeS said:
Much like Starbucks in the USA and elsewhere, by law every town and city in Canada must have at least one Tim Horton doughnut franchise for every 100 residents, with free wifi of course.
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Only been to Canada once as a youngster, but with all I hear about Tim Horton's, I will certainly have to check one out when I finally visit our northern neighbor again ;-)
 
And to stay on topic, I love the Orinoco cards, great support on SO many platforms. I am also fond of the Cisco 350 cards, they are also fairly well supported under DOS (and most other OS's).

I think the main reason the Orinoco cards are SO popular is they were so universal and also often rebranded by other companies. They were really king until the 802.11g spec stuff came a long with faster speeds and stronger (but not unbreakable) WPA protection.
 
RWallmow said:
Only been to Canada once as a youngster, but with all I hear about Tim Horton's, I will certainly have to check one out when I finally visit our northern neighbor again ;-)
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Thanks for reminding me that it's Tim Hortons; it used to be Tim Horton's, but apostrophes are illegal in parts of Canada (true!).

OK, we may not really have one for every 100 people, but "Canada's per-capita ratio of doughnut shops surpassed those of all other countries." (from Wikipedia) So there, eh!

And this thread may finally inspire me to try setting up wireless on some of my DOS boxes...
 
Chuck(G) said:
Ole, I had no idea that Coalmont was full of Wifi hotspots... :)
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No Wifi, but boy, there are some hotspots! This funny little town has only a few houses but the old Hotel survives and I just set up their wireless lan - you gotta ask for the password though.

Unknown_K said:
What do you care about wardriving anyway? Are you going around town looking for WEP encrypted routers to hack into?
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Wardriving is really of no interest. hehe I can get the passwords to my neighbours by just helping them set stuff up. lol Besides all they have on their computers is Windows and Viruses and Vesa cards ... oh wait. . . :) It's just that the eBay ads get all on about that, and the famous Orinoco Gold. Some people are obviously hoping to make a few extra bucks on the cachet of that and it obfuscates the issue.

Any of the Lucent Wavelan/Orinoco 16 bit PCMCIA cards have DOS packet drivers for them, you just need the original software and some card services software to setup the card. I prefer the Silver cards since they are cheap and the difference in WEP encryption doesn't matter (bronze is no WEP, silver is 64 bit, Gold is 128 bit, all are easily crackable).
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Thanks, I read all that (I always research before I post) and indeed the silver (or bronze) sounds just fine. I have absolutely no need for encryption for this application and just thought that a 486 laptop running DOS would be nice to have portable around the house. Outside of image editing or browsing, I tend to operate our computers through telnet anyway, so DOS is perfectly comfortable.

so I have the software if you need it
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Bingo! That is my worry. Getting the card and then finding the DOS driver. I'll pick out a card on eBay and then post back here.
 
MikeS said:
Thanks for reminding me that it's Tim Hortons; it used to be Tim Horton's, . . .
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The closest doughnut shop here is the dollar store (called the Loonie Bin) in Princeton. Although the nuts are fresh, they're not as good as Tim Hortons' pastry. (note the new correct spelling)

but apostrophes are illegal in parts of Canada (true!)
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I thought it was adverbs that were illegal. I see bill boards saying "drive safe", which in English sounds utterly ridiculous. I can't even move mine an inch across the floor.
 
Ole Juul said:
The closest doughnut shop here is the dollar store (called the Loonie Bin) in Princeton. Although the nuts are fresh, they're not as good as Tim Hortons' pastry. (note the new correct spelling)



I thought it was adverbs that were illegal. I see bill boards saying "drive safe", which in English sounds utterly ridiculous. I can't even move mine an inch across the floor.
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LOL

And if you ever come across a Cisco 350, this site has the drivers for them. They even support WEP from DOS, however its problematic, works best unencrypted.
 
RWallmow said:
And to stay on topic, I love the Orinoco cards, great support on SO many platforms. I am also fond of the Cisco 350 cards, they are also fairly well supported under DOS (and most other OS's).

I think the main reason the Orinoco cards are SO popular is they were so universal and also often rebranded by other companies. They were really king until the 802.11g spec stuff came a long with faster speeds and stronger (but not unbreakable) WPA protection.
Click to expand...

Like I mentioned earlier, the encryption is not an issue for me, but the number of rebranded cards is a bit confusing. Having had lots of experience with chipsets being changed without changing model numbers I don't trust any manufacturer any more. I see them as having a primary motivation of trying to screw me into buying something that I can't use. /rant

So, I've been looking at eBay. It looks like the silver and bronze are more expensive this week. I found two "gold" for a reasonable price:

$15.00 from China
$16.50 from US

Any suggestions as to which one is the best bet?
 
Ole Juul said:
Like I mentioned earlier, the encryption is not an issue for me, but the number of rebranded cards is a bit confusing. Having had lots of experience with chipsets being changed without changing model numbers I don't trust any manufacturer any more. I see them as having a primary motivation of trying to screw me into buying something that I can't use. /rant

So, I've been looking at eBay. It looks like the silver and bronze are more expensive this week. I found two "gold" for a reasonable price:

$15.00 from China
$16.50 from US

Any suggestions as to which one is the best bet?
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I would go with the US seller, less likelyhood that its a counterfeit copy (that may or may not work as well), and you will likely get it shipped much sooner all for only $1.50 more, I would say its worth it.
 
RWallmow said:
I would go with the US seller, less likelyhood that its a counterfeit copy (that may or may not work as well), and you will likely get it shipped much sooner all for only $1.50 more, I would say its worth it.
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You're probably right. I'll take a chance on the US one. It's actually a "silver" but looks like it could be what I'm looking for. Indeed it is quicker (only 10 days) from the US and the Proxim card seems to be a common one. He doesn't say if it's a Hermes chip or not though.
 
Chuck(G) said:
So what would you call Canadian cuisine? Doughnuts and poutine?
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LOL It's funny, but even the word "poutine" was never known here on the West Coast until recent times. Perhaps there is an East Coast culture of using it. I've never seen it, but I think it's some kind of cheese sauce or soup that you dribble on stuff that you might have wanted to eat (before that happened).
 
Ole Juul said:
You're probably right. I'll take a chance on the US one. It's actually a "silver" but looks like it could be what I'm looking for. Indeed it is quicker (only 10 days) from the US and the Proxim card seems to be a common one. He doesn't say if it's a Hermes chip or not though.
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FYI The Silver ones are the same hardware as gold, its a software limitation, with some hacking of firmware it can be made into a gold. For the life of me I don't remember how you fool the firmware flasher though, its been well over 10 years since I flash-hacked an Orinoco card.
 
RWallmow said:
FYI The Silver ones are the same hardware as gold, its a software limitation, with some hacking of firmware it can be made into a gold. For the life of me I don't remember how you fool the firmware flasher though, its been well over 10 years since I flash-hacked an Orinoco card.
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I'm not likely to have anybody around here who knows how to sniff passwords from a network stream. I'm more worried about bears sniffing stuff. ;)

I just ordered the US one that I linked to above. Not that I need it, but I like to play with RF stuff - does it have a jack?
 
Ole Juul said:
I'm not likely to have anybody around here who knows how to sniff passwords from a network stream. I'm more worried about bears sniffing stuff. ;)

I just ordered the US one that I linked to above. Not that I need it, but I like to play with RF stuff - does it have a jack?
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Every Orinoco I have encountered has had a antenna jack on it under a rubber cap on the end, but there's always the possibility there was some odd revision without a jack. I have broken a few Orinocos in my day too, and found that inside that end plastic cap there's pretty large solder pads on the antenna if someone ever had to add an external jack.
 
I just got my Proxim silver card. Model 8420-WD labelled 5 volt 16 bit, so that all looks good.

When I plugged it in and tried the drivers that I had, but it looks like there's some bit-rot in what I had. After an hour of looking at the net and downloading a bunch of drivers in the hopes that there was a DOS version included - I'm stuck. I can't find any such thing. Can anybody help me out here?

I guess I need both WVLAN.SYS and WVLANxx.COM - and maybe the example .CFG.
 
Ironically the Linux support/community really ran with these cards. Rarely have that problem.. I can find the linux drivers everywhere, windows drivers for whatever reason are being a pain.
 
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