[Gllug] Wireless cards -PC world

[Richard Cohen]

On Tue, 1 Jan 2002, mallum wrote:

> on Tue, Jan 01, 2002 at 08:24:02PM -0000, Jake Jellinek wrote:
> > Come within half a mile (or so) of my house, use DHCP and you'll be
> > broadband surfing without any need to authenticate. Sniff all my clear text
> > traffic if you like.
> >
> > Noone in the area seems to have discovered this yet though, been running it
> > like this for about a year, never had a single unexpected DHCP request (or
> > sign of unusual network activity).

For what it's worth, I didn't mean that I had no idea what to do with a
card, in general.  I already have a 2-node (plus one other temporary node at
the moment) wireless LAN at home :-)

I meant that since I normally only have two wireless nodes, and I've just
bought a new hub because 10Mbps is too slow for my *wired* LAN, I didn't
have a use for a third card.  Mallum has given me one...

Oh, and my wireless LAN is pretty open.  No DHCP, so you'd have to sniff a
few packets to work out an IP address to use, and most of the traffic I do
on the LAN is ssh or simple HTTP requests, so my traffic is relatively safe.
Since I know I get a signal standing on the pavement outside my building,
and no signal standing on the other side of the road, you'd have to know it
was there :-)  Actually, I think APs get more range, so that might be
better, depending on how much of an AP the Prism card can be...

> I had the same problem. Am now denying unknown mac addresses via a little
> iptables magic - though Im sure it'd wouldn't be  too hard to
> spoof a mac address on one of the cards. Keep meaning to switch to
> IPSec ( freeswan ) but its meant to be a bitch to set up.
>
> BTW, If youre thinking about wireless stay well clear of the dlink
> cards - they are pure evil IMHO. Orinocos work well, but if you wanna run an
> AP [1] then get something with a prism2 chip ( like a linksys ). The
> sitecom has a prism2 chip but Im yet to get it running in Master mode
> - I think a firmware upgrade is needed but that requires a firmware
> upgrade with a windows laptop ( which I dont have :( )

I honestly didn't know about this...

I had two Lucent cards, which work just fine.  Would I be right in saying
that, in the general case, simple cards can't (or don't) do AP functions?

I've compiled up this driver and installed it, and it seems to be working
well.  I actually have a dual-booting laptop at the moment (the temporary
node - lent to me by someone I've been working on a project with), so I
booted up Windows and tried to run the upgrade.  Something went wrong, to
the extent that the PCMCIA support in that Windows installation seems to be
completely bust now :-)  Anyway, I tried the driver on my home gateway (ADSL
in one side, wired and wireless LAN out the other) and it seems to be
working - my iPAQ has 'logged on' to the AP, and is happily working in
Managed mode (with power management on, even), while the gateway machine is
in Master mode.

Somewhat worryingly, the stuff in /proc/net/prism2 seems to have vanished,
but the link is still up.  Hmmmm....

>   -- mallum
>
>
> [1] http://people.ssh.com/jkm/Prism2/

Anyway, thanks for pointing that out :-)

Cheers
Richard


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