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Wire-Fire \1A USB-to-Ethernet adapter

In June 2009 I came across a little USB-to-Ethernet converter. It was sold for a very cheap price at the Swedish site Tradera which can be described as the "Swedish eBay" (actually, eBay owns this company as well...).

Since it had no drivers included and the information was quite poor I took the chance and bought it just to (hopefully) see today's fantastic capabilities of the Linux kernel and the included modules.

The device is a light-grey small (55mm x 39mm x 35mm) plastic box, weight about 50 grams, with a blue text on top stating that this is a "USB To Ethernet Adapter". The USB logo is visible as well. A USB B-connector on one side and and RJ45 Ethernet connector pointing in a 90-degree angle counting from the USB connector.

There is also a sticker underneath telling us something about an "EMI Model: XZ850530" and it complies with FCC part 15-rules, etc.

So far so good. Now let's see what the kernel says when we plug it into my Ubuntu Linux 9.04 64-bit computer.

dmesg output:

[24145.320012] usb 4-2: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 4
[24145.538767] usb 4-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[24145.578371] kaweth 4-2:1.0: Downloading firmware...
[24145.578378] usb 4-2: firmware: requesting kaweth/new_code.bin
[24145.963352] usb 4-2: firmware: requesting kaweth/new_code_fix.bin
[24146.044325] usb 4-2: firmware: requesting kaweth/trigger_code.bin
[24146.070321] usb 4-2: firmware: requesting kaweth/trigger_code_fix.bin
[24146.078317] kaweth 4-2:1.0: Firmware loaded.  I'll be back...
[24146.078326] kaweth: probe of 4-2:1.0 failed with error -5
[24146.078346] usbcore: registered new interface driver kaweth
[24146.577533] usb 4-2: USB disconnect, address 4
[24152.164009] usb 4-2: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 5
[24152.381720] usb 4-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[24152.397551] kaweth 4-2:1.0: Firmware present in device.
[24152.398634] kaweth 4-2:1.0: Statistics collection: 13fbffff
[24152.398637] kaweth 4-2:1.0: Multicast filter limit: 80
[24152.398639] kaweth 4-2:1.0: MTU: 1514
[24152.398641] kaweth 4-2:1.0: Read MAC address 00:00:21:2c:83:d2
[24152.408309] kaweth 4-2:1.0: kaweth interface created at eth2

Great! Once again the Linux kernel showed that the chances are good that you will get your stuff working even without downloading and compiling an external driver.

The Ethernet standard seems to be the 10Base-T.

 

 

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