Installing and Using Wavelan Bronze Turbo Cards in Sony Vaio Laptops

Last updated 9/24/99 by Johanson
[small VAIO notes added by Lucasp]

Installing

The following steps are known to work to get the heavy [and small] Sony Vaios running with the WAvelan Bronze Turbo cards.  Before doing anything it is recommended that you read through all of the directions.

First, make sure you have the following:

Now follow these directions:
  1. If you have an old style "soap on a rope" Wavelan card, remove the drivers by going to the networks control panel (Start|Control Panel|Network), selecting the Wavelan Adapter, and clicking the remove button.  Then go to the "Add/Remove Programs" in the control panel and remove the Wavelan Manager (if you installed it).
  2. Cold boot your machine with the Wavelan Bronze Turbo card in one of the PCMCIA slots.

    3. [small VAIO: Plug in USB 3.5" drive before booting if you want to install from floppy.]
  3. It should find the new card, and prompt for drivers.  If you have the floppy it should automatically detect, otherwise you need to browse to the directory where you extracted the drivers.
  4. After a while it will prompt for settings for the card.  You should leave all the settings at their defaults.
  5. It will copy some files over.  If it asks if you want to keep newer versions, say "Yes".

    6. [small VAIO: If it can't find wvlan41.inf, tell it to look in A:]
  6. Wait a while.  It may seem like it is hanging, but it will finish eventually and ask if you want to reboot.  Say, "yes".
  7. After rebooting you need to set the TCP/IP properties.  Go to "Start | Control Panel | Network" and select "TCP/IP -> WaveLAN IEEE PC Card", then click "Properties".  Set them as follows:
  8. If you haven't already done this for an Ethernet card, click also on the "File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks" and disable "BrowseMaster"
  9. You will be prompted to reboot, when the machine comes back up you will be on the net, but will only have access to "spinach.stanford.edu".

    10. [small VAIO: To use the waveLAN, you need to disable the built-in ethernet port. Go to Start-- Settings-- Control Panel-- Sony Notebook Setup, and under the tab "Enable Ports", uncheck ethernet adapter. If you don't do this, it will keep trying to send packets via a (possibly non-connected) ethernet wire. You can switch on the fly from ethernet to waveLAN without rebooting, but you cannot re-enable the ethernet port without rebooting.]
  10. Opethout rebooting, but you cannot re-enable the ethernet port without rebooting.]
  11. Open a web browser window and go to "http://spinach.stanford.edu".  Choose "Stanford Faculty, Staff or Students", then follow the directions to authenticate yourself.  This will give you 24-hours of access using your particular WaveLAN card, regardless of whether you reboot, etc..  You will need to follow this same process to re-authenticate after 24 hours has elapsed.
If you want to, you can also install the WaveMANAGER client which is in the 'wavemgr' sub-directory on the floppy, or in the extracted files on your hard disk.  It has a standard setup.exe file, and installs a simple app that will show you the WaveLAN signal strength at your current location.

The card should automatically be ready to work on the network as soon as you insert it or boot in the future.  It seems to survive fine through standby and hibernation modes.  You will need to authenticate through Spinach whenever more than 24-hours has elapsed since your last authentication.

Frequently Asked Questions

  1. Q: Will you have to go through the authentication procedure with Spinach every time you plug in the WaveLAN card?  The logical way to use these cards is to plug them in and out depending on whether you are at your desk (in which case ethernet is faster and more convenient) or roaming.


    2. A: No, you don't have to authenticate every time you plug in your card.  Spinach allocates and activates an IP address for your laptop for a 24 hour period after you first authenticate.  When that time has passed you will need to re-authenticate.
     
  2. Q: So why do I have to authenticate with Spinach anyway?  Why can't I just plug in the card and go?


    3. A: The dynamic IP address you get from the DHCP server is on a protected sub-net that only has one way for packets to get to the outside world,
    which is through a custom designed Linux router.

    When you first plug in the WaveLAN card, that router is set to not forward packets from your machine to the rest of the Stanford network and world. This is so people from outside can't get a host on our networks by just bringing a wireless notebook into the building.  After you authenticate, the router is changed to allow packets from your laptop to go through for a certain time period (24 hours), after which you have to re-authenticate.  The binding of IP address to your WaveLAN card and the permission to access the internal net persist even if you reboot or remove the WaveLAN card for a while.
     

  3. Q: I can map the network drives from Graphics Lab machines, but I can't map my laptops drive onto the machines in the lab?  Is it possible to map the drive from my laptop from other machines?


    4. A: Your machine is dynamically being assigned a name and IP whenever you activate your machine with the WaveLAN card in Gates and authenticate through Spinach.  To map the drive, you need to find out what IP address was assigned to your laptop.

    There are a couple ways to do this.  Probably the easiest is when you autenticate with Spinach.  After authenticating with your leland ID, you will eventually get to a page that says you have access and the IP address which you are using.

    Using this IP from the other machine you should be able to map drives that are on your laptop.  For example, if you got 171.64.70.158 and you have set your laptop to share the C drive as C$, you could map '\\171.64.70.158\C$'.

    Another way to get the IP address is to go the start menu, choose run, then type 'winipcfg' in the dialog box.  From the pull down menu choose Wavelan.  The dialog should then show in the IP box your temporary IP address, which can be used as above.

    Note that you also have a character string machine name which is something like 'csroam8'.  This is displayed at the same place as the IP during the Spinach authentication, or can be found by typing 'nslookup 171.64.XX.XXX' (where XX.XXX are the appropriate values from your temporary IP) from any shell prompt on one of the Irix machines.  Unfortunately Windows doesn't seem to accept this name when mapping drives due to some quirk of Windows networking.  This name can, however, be used for standard TCP based