I’m now running my main development PC directly on the wireless
network. This took two trips to CompUSA (three if you count my initial
survey of the products on offer), upgrading to FreeBSD 6.0 and a
custom kernel build, but it is a going concern now. Very exciting, I’m
sure. It is for me, since now this box does not have to live behind an
old Powerbook with a chafing hard disk sharing its Airport connection
in NAT mode, which eliminates one noisy beast from my office.
Initially, I came away with a LinkSys WMP11 card that would cost me,
after two rebates, the grand sum of five dollars. I had googled for
this product and found out it is based on the well-supported Prism
chipset, so I took one home. However, the card I had bought turned out to be a new revision, with a completely different chipset that the
FreeBSD developers had never heard of! Thanks Linksys for springing
that on the unsuspecting public. Of course there are Windows drivers,
so the unsuspecting public still has something to play with. As, it
turned out, did I. I turned to the NDIS wrapper support and found out
that this only came with FreeBSD 5: time to upgrade the box from
4-STABLE. After a fresh new install (the only thing building world did
for me was make every program I started dump core… boy was I glad
that I had backed up my home directory before I started on this
track), I got the NDIS driver to work (great hints by Dannyman),
but unfortunately it did not support WEP. Why do we care about WEP?
Isn’t it completely uncool to rely on WEP these days? Actually, it is
in a way. In the same way that the lock on a bathroom stall door
prompts most people to try the other stall, I assume the
1337 H@x0R is going to hook up to the unencrypted network first and I can see up to six open networks from my second bedroom.
So, I pulled the Linksys card, took it back to CompUSA and got a
Netgear WG311T instead. This card is directly supported by the ath(4) driver… or so I thought. Of course, this was also a newer revision of the chipset, but at least Netgear didn’t switch sources on me. Support for this, the 5212 chip, was only in FreeBSD 6.0, so another upgrade was in order. However, everything works now. Phew.
