D-Link AirPlus DWL-650 Plus
From Superk
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Recently I had to buy a new laptop and decided while I was at it, I'd spend the couple extra dollars on an extraordinary deal on wireless networking. What I got was really a great deal for the price, but hardly tops my recommendation lists for product of the year. This is my initial experiences with this product and my first thoughts.
The Purchase
TigerDirect (an online computer shop that has always impressed me with their great deals) had an incredible deal on a D-Link WiFi combo including both wireless access point (WAP) and WiFi adapter card (NIC). The deal in a nutshell was for the combo at a price of around $75 minus a $25 mail-in rebate - the item is refurbished. It included a D-Link DI-614+ WAP and a DWL-650+ AirPlus card and boasts the enhanced throughput of up to 22Mbps over standard 802.11b connections (2.4GHz). In fact, with the updated firmware additions, it is supposed to do 44Mbps assuming you have both the D-Link enhanced products at either end of the connection.
Because the WAP itself really doesn't care which OS you are using, I won't mention it much more. It's configurable with a web interface and offers a fairly decent firwall and basic VPN features (I haven't played with these since I'm just using the WAP to extend my existing network to WiFi). Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is included ranging from 64-bit to 256-bit encryption levels. Purhaps I'll write more on this when/if I take the time to actually set it up and use it's features.
Windows
Using this combination in Windows worked adequately. I say adequately because it really did just work. There is no need to really use the D-Link drivers if all you want is a quick setup since it's natively supported in Windows XP (I can't vouch for the other Windows flavors). However, to get the enhanced 44Mbps speeds, you will need to upgrade the firmware to something more recent than what Windows XP supplies. Also using the latest D-Link drivers makes it possible to use their useful utility for configuration and monitoring. The Windows WiFi configuration is adequate, but doesn't offer the great signal strength/integrity/bandwidth status view that the D-Link utility does.
The only real problems I've noticed with this card thus far in Windows are the horrible support for advanced standard features (as you'll read more about later) and the fact that it tends to take awhile to initialize itself before finally settling on a connection. Perhaps this second complaint is just the nature of WiFi - I'm not sure since this is my first WiFi ever so comments on this issue are very welcome. As for the first complaint, as I stated, read on and get more details.
Linux
I decided to run RedHat 9 on this laptop just because of it's general popularity and my desire to learn RedHat's quirks. I was very hesitant to even purchase this card due to my concerns about it's Linux compatibility. Finally I found some documents (listed below) that led me to believe it was worth a try. I will say straight away that this card does indeed work in Linux, but it's not an easy endeavour to make it do that. There are two projects that aim to bring this adapter to the Linux world and neither are commercially recognized as official in the least. The Open Source project is hosted on sourceforge and depends on either your copy of Windows or the D-Link drivers for firmware. The binary version of the driver comes with a built in reverse-engineered firmware.
I haven't had any luck with the open source project which requires compiling the driver based on current kernel source headers so I decided to use the binary package for the time being. Installing the binary package is fairly straightforward and only required a little tweaking to work on my system. My current kernel is an updated version of the 2.4.20 kernel (2.4.20-20.9) from RedHat and the binary driver comes prebuilt for the 2.4.20-8 so it needs to be modified to correctly identify itself to the 2.4.20-20.9 kernel. All the required modifications are well documented in the included text howto. Other than that, the only other requirement that wasn't documented was to modify the order of the boot scripts so that pcmcia would load prior to the network coming up so that the networking script has a working adapter to bind to.
Each of the drivers discussed above can be found here:
Open Source acx100 Driver Project
The BIG Problem
The real reason I can't actually recommend this great deal is because of the chipset the device uses and the awful support problems I'm finding because of it. From what I've read, the AirPlus 650+ card is based on the TI chipset and TI hasn't/won't release specs for the chipset publicly so it's next to impossible to make drivers for the card. Both the open source project and the binary project depend on a degree of reverse-engineering and the use of firmwares to be built into the drivers. The open source project actually uses the firmware files from either the Windows native files or the ones that come directly from D-Link. These files are placed into the driver source directory tree and are actually built into the final driver module. For some reason I just can't get this to work. I intend on spending some additional time on this in the near future as everything I read indicates the open source driver is the better choice for higher reliability, compatibility and features. The binary driver uses a reverse-engineered firmware that was designed specifically for Linux rather than using the firmwares available from D-Link. Obviously this makes it likely it is missing features and/or compatibility that could only be obtained from the manufacturer or published specs.
Conclusion
All in all, this really is a great deal and if all you want/need is a WiFi connection to the rest of your network, it's a steal. If you intend to do some serious wardriving or need to have the ability to do more advanced LAN monitoring, I recommend you stay away from this card at all costs. There are lots of other products on the market and Linux and Windows both are expanding WiFi capabilities and compatibilities constantly. If your needs are more than very basic, you can afford something better than this card. Of course, at $50, even if you never use the card, you are still getting a decent deal in the WAP. Look around TigerDirect though and you might find the WAP alone for even less.
UPDATE - 11-03-2003
I have been having some very serious problems with the DWL-650+ card in Windows XP lately. I've tried running with both the 3.05 and 3.06 driver/firmware updates, but continue to have problems with either. The general problem is that things either just lock up (ie, hard drive just stops, mouse is locked, nothing happens) or the dreaded BSOD is shown with an error related to the airplus.sys driver. I'm continuing to research this, but have found several other posts around the Internet which leads me to believe I am not alone with this problem. Keep an eye on this article for further updates and information.
UPDATE 11-5-2003
I think I've solved the major problem with the card locking up the computer (at least in Windows so far). The issue would result from the power management functions of the laptop disabling the card and then when it is re-enabled, the IRQ develops a conflict and crashes the computer. So far I have set all the PCI IRQ settings to be automatically determined as opposed to manually set and it has worked flawlessly ever since. I will provide an additional update for Linux as soon as I have some results.
