BlogFish

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:

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

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.

Another presentation from BSDCan 2005 was published. Reyk Floeter held a presentation about the WLAN support in OpenBSD. The presentation also contains information about the recent activism of OpenBSD developers to fight binary-only drivers and firmware. More information on this can be found on kerneltrap.org.

Further Theo de Raadt said in a post to misc@openbsd.org that this presentation caused some trouble at BSDCan. Some FreeBSD developers, among them Poul-Henning Kamp, attacked the OpenBSD team because of the statements in the presentation and criticize Theo/OpenBSD for their effort in trying to free the WLAN driver. Citing Poul-Henning Kamp from Theo’s mail:

Much rethoric about freedom and little appreciation for the way the world actually works, as opposed to how it looks like it works from the headquarters of OpenBSD.
...
I guess I’m not the right person to appreciate the valor of their crusade, but somehow their rethoric reminds me too much about Rote Arme Fraktion and similar terrorgroups of the seventies which tried to change society by bombing political correct holes in it.

Theo’s mail can be found here.

Personally I appreciate the effort of the OpenBSD team. I do not like the idea of binary-only drivers and “pollution” of the source tree. I can understand those who just want to use their nVida graphics card with 3D acceleration or their Atheros WLAN card but I value the freedom of having the sources and being able to modify and improve them more. Accepting binary-only driver sends a wrong signal to the vendors, they will continue to to publish binary-only drivers. When somebody complains they can say “we alread have free drivers, use the free Linux driver”, but this driver typically only works on Linux/i386. Same thing with NDIS on FreeBSD/Linux. Great to use your Win-only WLAN card under FreeBSD/Linux but what do you do if you happens to use macppc or Sparc?