OpenBSD wireless

Posted by Jonathan

I bought a WLAN card for my wrap in order to build a wireless access point. The card is a Wistron CM9 and is based on the Atheros chip. You may need to upgrade to current it you experience problems with the card. From the dmesg:

ath0 at pci0 dev 13 function 0 “Atheros AR5212” rev 0×01: irq 12
ath0: AR5212 5.9 phy 4.3 rf5112 3.6, FCC1A, address 00:0b:6b:7b:b3:1a

Creating a wireless access point is very easy. Just create /etc/hostname.ath0 with the following content:

# cat /etc/hostname.ath0
inet 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.0 NONE media autoselect
mode 11b mediaopt hostap nwid wrap chan 11

This is taken from ath(4) and ifconfig(8). I added the ‘mode 11b’ as my clients speak 11b/g. The default mode is 11a and it took me some time to figure out why I could not see any network even while using a wireless sniffer like Kismac or Kismet.

I already implemented a VPN through OpenVPN. I will cover it soon.

Comments

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  1. z0mbix – August 17, 2005 @ 05:50 PM
    Hi, How are you patching your WRAP? Cheers z0mbix
  2. Jonathan – August 17, 2005 @ 09:57 PM
    I usually do a binary update to a pre-compiled stable from another machine.

    That means that you compile kernel+world on the other machine and then make a release out of it.

    See http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=release&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=OpenBSD+Current&arch=i386&format=html for how to build the release and my article on how to install it:
    http://blog.innerewut.de/articles/2005/08/10/updating-openbsd

    If you trac current/snapshots just upgrade to another snapshot from the ftp master.
  3. gogo – November 02, 2005 @ 11:01 PM
    What's the overall slowdown of the wrap system when using vpn with it?
  4. Jonathan – November 03, 2005 @ 12:03 AM
    Using OpenVPN with a laptop while acting as a router/NAT gateway with parallel downloads of the 3.8 src from other machines (wired) brings the WRAP down to 80% idle. I haven't tested bulk transfers via OpenVPN and the atheros card yet as I use the WLAN only for surfing and mailing. I assume that 3-5 clients should be no problem for OpenVPN/WRAP on the wireless device as long as no one starts big downloads.