At a recent Linux users' gathering I temporarily saved the day when a WRT router was practically bricked, by setting up my netbook (Acer Aspire One) running 8-CURRENT as a wireless access point. It had wired connectivity to the Internet from one side and offered WiFi via its Atheros card on the other side. In between it did NAT and protected the LAN side from the Linux hackers, both with ipfw. Here is how I configured it.
Category Archives: wifi
Minor wi(4) hacking
I finally had some time, a need for wireless connectivity in the shop and found my stash of old Prism 2, 2.5 and 3 cards. I thought I'd try them out with the new vap stuff.
First, there's a new filter on the firmware revisions in the driver. Very old versions of the firmware basically don't work without a lot of coaxing and workarounds. They are no longer supported. In addition, symbol cards are fairly rare and there's no readily available documentation for them, so support for them was removed as well. This filtering is a good thing, since it will keep people from using cards that are known to be broken. However, I had to fix a bug in the interrupt registration to make this work out OK (and to also stop spontaneous panics sometimes on attach if there was a lot of interrupt activity on a shared interrupt). I basically moved the interrupt registration to the end of the attach function, rather than the beginning and solved both problems.
All of these cards that I had don't have new enough firmware to support WPA. This highlights another problem: wpa_supplicant doesn't filter out WPA APs when it is looking for things to attach to, or otherwise provide a meaningful error message that would tell the user the reason that WPA isn't working is that their card is too old/lame to support this new-fangled stuff....
I wound up solving my problem with an atheros card that just worked, once I found them...
First, there's a new filter on the firmware revisions in the driver. Very old versions of the firmware basically don't work without a lot of coaxing and workarounds. They are no longer supported. In addition, symbol cards are fairly rare and there's no readily available documentation for them, so support for them was removed as well. This filtering is a good thing, since it will keep people from using cards that are known to be broken. However, I had to fix a bug in the interrupt registration to make this work out OK (and to also stop spontaneous panics sometimes on attach if there was a lot of interrupt activity on a shared interrupt). I basically moved the interrupt registration to the end of the attach function, rather than the beginning and solved both problems.
All of these cards that I had don't have new enough firmware to support WPA. This highlights another problem: wpa_supplicant doesn't filter out WPA APs when it is looking for things to attach to, or otherwise provide a meaningful error message that would tell the user the reason that WPA isn't working is that their card is too old/lame to support this new-fangled stuff....
I wound up solving my problem with an atheros card that just worked, once I found them...