Re: FreeBSD as an wireless access point

From: Chronos (chronos_at_infinitedimensions.co.uk)
Date: 10/26/05 

Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2005 03:58:22 +0100

After replacing Derek Kuli?ski / takeda with a small shell script on
Wednesday 26 Oct 2005 01:49, the following appeared on stdout:

> So do you have any recommendations as to which hardware to choose?
> I would like to have g, but I can live with b for some time (especially
> that my Internet connection is still slower than the "b" speed - I can
> always connect ethernet cable if I would have need to transfer huge data
> between computers :)))

I would say, judging from the huge support it is receiving (kismet works,
MAC ACLs work, bridging works, the TX algorithms and HAL have been
updated in 6.0 and most of all, it is the only card upon which
wpa_supplicant works) that your best bet is an Atheros based card. man 4
ath for details.

> So what cards might work as an AP, even in 802.11b mode, but will be
> fully supported in 6.0?

Definitely ath(4) based, which will give you 802.11b in 5.x. Works
flawlessly here in hostap mode on 6.0-RC1. There are many cards that
*were* Atheros based that now aren't, such as my Netgear WG311 which has
a TI chipset in version 2.0. Basically, anything the MadWiFi driver for
Linux supports /should/ be fine in FreeBSD-6.0. See this page for some
quite good pointers:

http://madwifi.org/wiki/Compatibility

You'll notice that Sam Leffler, the FreeBSD wireless guru, is one of the
developers of the MadWiFi project. Little surprise some of the
information there is pertinent to the ath(4) driver in FreeBSD.

No, I don't work for Atheros. The only reason I say the above is that at
present, the ath driver gives the user the most flexibility and if the
user wishes to use WPA, it's easily the only choice. 

-- 
Chronos

Relevant Pages

  • Re: DOT11_OPERATION_MODE_NETWORK_MONITOR in NDIS 6.0 on Vista
    ... The card I'm using is a Linksys WMP55AG v1.2. ... the Atheros Chipset AR5001X+. ... Gianluca Varenni, Windows DDK MVP ... Vista from within an NDIS protocol driver? ...
    (microsoft.public.development.device.drivers)
  • Re: Debian Etch compatible wireless PCI card recommendations
    ... wireless router which allows him to send songs to his speakers via iTunes. ... driver, this driver can only work at 11 mbit/s, but ndiswrapper+win32 ... Any Atheros-based PCI or PCMCIA card. ... but I still prefer Atheros hardware. ...
    (Debian-User)
  • Re: [opensuse] Atheros AR242X driver with openSUSE 11.1
    ... I don't have the wifi card AR242x but my another chipset of Atheros ... Disable or blacklist ath5k driver by add the blacklist ath5k to ... Devices | Network Settings ...
    (SuSE)
  • Re: Wireless Adapters for Linux
    ... The driver they specify is madwifi. ... Theses are Atheros based cards. ... Atheros gave considerable help in the creation of an open source driver. ... One thing I will say - the price they want for an atheros based card is ...
    (Fedora)
  • RE: [UPDATED PATCH] EFI support for ia32 kernels
    ... >> reuse a single driver image for multiple architectures assuming there ... As one of the people responsible for the EFI Specification and our ... Perhaps the UNDI network card interface that Intel developed ... BIOS can't shadow that much ROM code. ...
    (Linux-Kernel)