Trigger Finger

OK, hopefully I am now back with a bitch bang. No really it’s a bitch and moan about Netgear drivers, but it’s also one of those rare situations where I can also offer a solution.Having moved into the new house, my little Windows Home Server had been pretty neglected. It sat in the workroom at the far end of the house, powered down and twiddling it’s silicon thumbs. The problem was that I had cabled up most of the house for the other PC’s, but this poor neglected server was sitting gathering dust because it was just so far away from the switches and routers. I could not find a reasonable route through the house that would lead to my cat6 cable being anything less than 35 metres! Even then the cable would have to cause some ugliness I was determined to avoid.

Given my fairly crappy experiences with wireless range in recent years, I was reluctant to pay for a PCI card only to be dissapointed again. But in building a computer for a friend who had a wireless card (Netgear 311T) as part of the configuration I saw the reception was pretty respectable (60% signal). So I took the plunge and bought the exact same card to put into my WHS box.

I popped in the card, and then popped in the driver disc. Ran the setup, and got only good vibrations from the setup procedure, only to find at the end of it that no actual drivers were installed!

Having investigated further I found there was no support for server products which seemed a little odd to me. So i set about looking for the inf files on the disc only to find them non-existent. They are all wrapped up in an .exe file that I couldn’t extract.

Never one to take defeat so easily (especially when the store to return it to is over 60km away) I watched the setup and saw it temporarily extracted to a location which I found through a search for the .msi file that flashed up on the ‘Extracting’ progress bar. I then extracted the .msi using the ever useful msiexec command and finally found the inf’s. Alas, the driver would install via the inf file, but the device wouldn’t start. I download all the versions from 3.3 to 5 and all of them failed in the same way.

After bitching and ranting for a while, I thought I should see what method the various linux distributions were using for this card, figuring if they can hack the driver for Linux then it must be possible for Windows. At this point I learnt that Atheros make the actual chipset and that they had their own generic drivers available, however they were not easy to find. Finally I had to defile myself and my PC by going to that ad-ridden spamhole driverguide.net to find the drivers. After selling my soul i was finally able to download the driver and BAM! The card works flawlessly!

So Netgear, why hide your inf’s in a sealed .exe? Why not support server products? I understand that an enterprise server is not a good place for wireless, but what about all these home server products? And finally god damn it… why not just give us the Atheros drivers in the first place? They work better (75-80% connection) and dont install your crap little ‘utilities’ either.

Anyway no thanks to Netgear, I have a WG311T wireless network card working on Windows Home Server, I am guessing should work on any other server product too.

Related posts:

1. When Home Servers Go Tits-up!