FreeBSD Wireless Access Points with Atheros Cards

[Mark Moellering]

Nick,

	I tried this maybe a month back.  I added an ath card to a firewall (becoming 
the third NIC) and set it up following the directions.  While I could connect 
to the access point/firewall, I could not get to anything beyond it.  After 
some reading, I decdied to buy a standalone access point and replace the 
wireless ath card with a wired card to use to connect to the access point.  
The standalone access point (Netgear) wasn't that much more than the card and 
from everything I have read is the better way to go.
	If you are able to sned data through the access point, I would love to hear 
about it...

Sincerely

Mark 

On Wednesday 07 June 2006 8:11 am, Nick Withers wrote:
> G'day all,
>
> I was recently asked to set up a wireless access point by a
> mate. Having read section 27.3.3.2 - "Building a FreeBSD Access
> Point"
> ("http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/network-wireles
>s.html") from the FreeBSD Handbook I duly advised my friend that they'd
> need to procure one of the Prism cards listed in the wi(4) man
> page, as, according to the Handbook, "In order to set up a
> wireless access point with FreeBSD, you need to have a
> compatible wireless card. Currently, only cards with the Prism
> chipset are supported".
>
> When he got back to me the next day and said he couldn't find
> one in any major store and that he'd been told they were no
> longer available first-hand (whether all this is true or not,
> I'm not entirely sure - but it's not really all that relevant
> for the purposes of this question) I was a little surprised.
>
> After much more stuffing about, the ath(4) man page caught my
> eye and I found the magic sentence: "Supported features include
> 802.11 and 802.3 frames, power management, BSS, IBSS, and
> host-based access point operation modes".
>
> I've subsequently set the thing up and it's now chugging away
> merrily in hostap mode with hostapd helping out with 802.11i
> shennanigans. It appears to be fully operational.
>
> My question, then, is this: Is the access point I've set up not
> actually functioning as an access point in the strictest sense
> of the term? Is the Handbook in need of a little attention in
> this area?
>
> I'll happily create a patch for the doc and submit a PR to
> have it updated, but just wanted to check before doing so that
> I'm not just being an idiot (I'm particularly good at that!).
>
> Thanks all!
> --
> Nick Withers
> email: nick at nickwithers.com
> Web: http://www.nickwithers.com
> Mobile: +61 414 397 446
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