XYMer's Home away from Home

Bought one of these a year & bit ago for my PC, didn't have Mac drivers, so I thought it was useless for my Mac when the PC was destroyed in the break-in.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Edimax/EW7722UTN/Specs

Yesterday I stumbled on drivers, it listed 10.3 to 10.6, so I thought it'd be PPC also, downloaded it & the DMG only said 10..3 to 10.5, but maybe it realized I was using a G5!?

Anyway, installed the driver & it works great...

http://www.mediatek.com/_en/07_download ... hp?sn=5002

Attention: The 10.4 Drivers did not work on an eMac/10.4.11, no idea why yet, sorry.

Great Find BD. Good to see hardware get a new lease of life.

_________________
VILA: They missed us! Avon's gadget works!
BLAKE: [to Avon] Is something wrong?
AVON: It just occurred to me, that as the description of a highly sophisticated technological achievement, 'Avon's gadget works' seems to lack a certain style.

hey that device made me think of something,
I have a wireless 3G connection to my ISP.
I use a USB stick "modem" that contains a SIM card.
the stick is plugged into a TP-Link router.
I am having problems getting a Toshiba Satelllite 400 to reliably connect to the router vie either Ethernet or Wireless.
I have written more detailed info elsewhere.
There is a USB device, i have seen one in operation, that basically connects wirelessly from another computer to the USB net stick modem and in such a way a customer can buy one ISP connection and share it between two computers.
has anyone heard of such a thing?
PS I found a device that i think is the one:
http://store.a-link.com/uk/WNU.html?id=UXqx8ipR
it is wireless 802.11, the only question is will it connect to the net-stick modem or the TP-link modem over 802.11 wireless. The device I am looking for must connect to the net stick directly not through the modem.

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-v

It's not clear what you're asking, but that device seems essentially the same as my Edimax.

Any more info on the net stick?

Are you maybe thing of WPS? This one can do it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Protected_Setup

net stick is a Huawei E3131

_________________
-v

It sounds like you have the equivalent of a USB 3G Modem, which allows you to attach to a cellular network for get internet access.

You would likely get love from a third party firmware running on a wireless router that has a USB port. You plug the USB modem into the router, designate it to be the WAN port, and you can connect up as many devices as you want to the router. The trick is getting a firmware that supports your particular make/model USB modem, then get a router that can run that firmware.

Sorry, I'm swamped today, otherwise I'd dig into support for that make/model... I know Tomato supports a wide variety of USB modems but the devil is in the details, you'd want to be sure that your particular modem is supported before pulling the trigger.

See edit of original post, 10.4.11 drivers do not work it seems.

So far it looks like Tomato doesn't support that modem. Shibby has done some work to support it but the text is all in polish and the translations are all wonky. It's not remotely plug and play.

Apparently that modem is really bizarre, it reports about a half-dozen devices are present to the host, like a USB DVD player, that simply don't exist. Huawei's drivers apparently ignore the defunct devices and work around a bunch of other bugs in the firmware.

OpenWRT apparently has a method for making it work but OpenWRT gives me headaches. It's entirely command line driven.

As I recall, there were strings you could edit in these USB Wifi driver files to get it to recognize a device with a different rebranding but same chipset, anyone know where to look?

I have a feeling the 10.5 driver is universal & the 10.4 driver isn't.

Sorry BD, my last comment was about vippu's Huawei cellular modem.

Sometimes there's a configuration file that can be edited but if the drivers are hard-coded to work with particular USB IDs then you can get stuck.

I would bet you could find the necessary IDs from something in XCode. USB Prober, maybe? Once you have them then you kind of need to know what the IDs are for a supported device, then you can try text searching the entire HD or at least the installer package (use Pacifist to extract its contents) for parts of the supported IDs. In theory you should be able to modify some of the relevant files with your device's ID and, fingers crossed, it'll work.

Thanks MB, as I recall the info was the product/vendor IDs from Sys Profiler, from 10.5.8 where it works...

802.11 n WLAN:

Product ID: 0x7722
Vendor ID: 0x7392

What's the best way to search for those in the hidden areas?

Tried Pacifist, haven't found what file it might be yet, might have to load some into a Hex editor?

Well you need IDs of a device that is supported to find out where they exist inside the files. Then you substitute them for your IDs and, hopefully, it's all good.

I'm having a bit of a fuzziness tonight, I only got 4 hours of sleep last night, so it's hard to remember how to do the search... crap I can't remember how to do it from Terminal. cd /ExtractedFilesFolder, cat * | grep -i ###### (one ID, then the other) would work for that particular folder, but there's a way to search the entire folder structure. You may need to convert the hexidecimal numbers to decimal and try another search.

Anonymous mentioned how to do it during the whole Flash "10.2" PPC plugin discussion, didn't he? Sorry, my eyes are barely cracked open at this point.

No problem MB, get an extra hour of sleep this weekend on me!

I think I did something like: find . -exec grep 11.9.900.117 {} \; which found all occurrences of 11.9.900.117. Naturally you'd need to substitute the version number of your flash player, and either replace the . in the command with the path to your Flash Player executable, or cd in to its package first.

Here's one that prints just the name of the file. This produces output that is prettier to look at, but the command is more of a pain in the arse to remember how to type since it's got a lot more going on and you have to remember the bash -c thing for the subshell. It's also just searching for strings, but that's fixable with a tiny bit more work:
find . -type f -exec bash -c 'if [ "`strings "{}" | grep "11.9.900.117"`" ] ; then echo "{}" ; fi' \;

If you're searching for something else in some other file, you'll have to know the exact string you want to match.

These two commands merely found which files have the matching string. They won't change the string or show you where it is in the file.

I don't recommend doing so, but you can automatically replace all occurrences of a string in a file with some other string. In a binary file it might be a good idea to make sure you have the same number of characters in each string. Anyway, this command will use perl to automatically create a backup of the file you're editing and replace all occurrences of the matched string with the new string. Again, this is dangerous:
perl -pi'.original' -e 's/11.9.900.117/12.9.900.117/' file_to_search

...where file_to_search is the path to a file upon which you want to perform the substitution.

You can easily combine the second command to find matching files with the command to perform the automatic substitution, but you probably don't want to because then when something goes catastrophically wrong -- as things often do in shell scripts because you forgot a quote, or put in an extra space, or made a mistake in the options for the command that caused it to behave subtly but critically differently from how you hoped, or left off some other piece of punctuation, or mistyped a filename -- it will go catastrophically wrong on all the writable files that the find command has found, which can be everything on your hard drive if you're running as root. I'm especially fond of errors that cause the file you're editing to be replaced by an empty file with a filename that starts with an error message. Caveat emptor.

Cheers,
- Anonymous

Hmmmm, why when I try sudu kextload some kext, it says improperly installed or can't be loaded, check rights & Permissions... copied from one drive to the other, in Get Info all contents seem to have the same permissions... I can sudo kextload the same file from the other drive providing full path.

Check the output of ls -aln on both new and old directories and chmod -R ./something.kext and chown -R ./something.kext on the copy to match the values on the original.

The permissions have to be exactly correct for the .kext to load, and it has to be correct down through all the subdirectories too (something Get Info normally doesn't touch).

If you can't figure out the mod (mode) then post the ls -aln from the old kext and I can muddle my way through to the correct three digit value. If I stare at man pages for 5 minutes I eventually figure my way through them. Then I spend several minutes pining for Netware.

Thanks MB...

Good load...

ls -aln /Volumes/Tiger/System/Library/Extensions/RT73USBWirelessDriver.kext
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 3 0 0 102 Oct 7 2008 .
drwxr-xr-x 240 0 0 8160 Nov 3 14:02 ..
drwxr-xr-x 5 0 0 170 Oct 7 2008 Contents

No load...

ls -aln /Volumes/CVBRaid0/System/Library/Extensions/RT73USBWirelessDriver.kext
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 3 0 0 102 Oct 7 2008 .
drwxr-xr-x 241 0 0 8194 Nov 4 15:54 ..
drwxr-xr-x 5 0 0 170 Nov 2 15:05 Contents

Oh that's right, 0:0 is used in Extensions. Try these in Terminal:That should kick out a lot of text (v is for verbose output), I'd copy it off and save it to a text file in case this doesn't work so we can puzzle over it.

Oh. It just occurred to me that this is probably Tiger. ditto under Tiger won't have the --nopreserveHFSCompression option so you should omit that.

Thanks MB, will try tomorrow at work!

The only other thing that occurs to me is that there may be a file (or files) somewhere else in the system that the .kext looks for, and unless you copy that (them) over too it won't work. Did you run an installer on the original boot disk?

Good luck! My experience with third parties under OSX has been really hit and miss. The only one who ever did things roughly like I expected was ATTO.

Thanks, yes I did but the cryptic naming parameters are not helpful, I'm certain I have copies of the installer on several drives, but likely a .dmg which I don't think I van search without mounting them.

Of course, amongst 1,000s of CDs/DVDs in various piles, drawers, & locations, I likely have the original!

I wonder if you look for files on that disk from around the same timestamp on the .kext if it'd find other files that are related to that .kext?

I'm looking at the uninstaller from the driver you linked to in the very first post, and references the following:

/System/Library/StartupItems/WiUtilityCardbusPCIStartUp/LoginItem
/Applications/AwakeRalinkUI.app
/Applications/WirelessUtilityCardbusPCI.app
~/Library/Preferences/com.Ralink.RaConfig.plist
/Library/Frameworks/RaWLAPI.Framework
/Library/Receipts/CardbusPCIWireless-Tiger.pkg

See if any of those items exist on /Volumes/Tiger/ or maybe even similarly-named items.

What I love to do is sort by date and 9 times out of 10 with old OSes like 10.4 and 10.5 you find the third party items at the top or bottom of the list, since the OS files tend to fall within a certain range.

Thanks again MB.

Good clue on the dates, back in OS9 I used to name download folders like D/L20060101, DL20060601... Usually ran OS9 most of the time even when I had 10.3/10.4/10.5 available.

Found the DMG called USB_Wireless_Installer.dmg, it worked fine installing the driver for the old ASUStek 802.11g USB stick in 10.4.11, (not of course the Edimax in this subject line), it also includes 10.3/Panther drivers I remember working fine... should anybody need them.

Thanks MB