Well, somebody ask me if i will try yet another wifi card. So the answer is yes :). Today i will look at the Netgear WG311.
I decided to sell this fucking Linksys WMP54G because, i’m sick of ndiswrapping, and because my Netgear WG511 works very well. So i decided to buy another netgear. "Et la c’est le drame" :) In fact the WG311 works w/ the prism54 driver since it use a Atheros chipset, despite a lot of users report it as a supported card w/ prism54. This is a fake !!! WG311 use Madwifi driver. Despite i’m really fond of prism durette / GT card, Atheros isn’t a bad choice too.
Installation:
First you need to use the current CVS version (don’t try the latest snapshot since the cvs support more things.) I decided to patch install this on a 2.6.4 kernel (support for 2.4.23 isn’t working for me). So simply build the module. And modprobe it .
You should get something like this:
ath0: mac 5.6 phy 4.1 5ghz radio 1.7 2ghz radio 2.3 ath0: 11b rates: 1Mbps 2Mbps 5.5Mbps 11Mbps ath0: 11g rates: 1Mbps 2Mbps 5.5Mbps 11Mbps 6Mbps 9Mbps 12Mbps 18Mbps 24Mbps 36Mbps 48Mbps 54Mbps ath0: 802.11 address: 00:09:5b:98:0d:85 ath0: Atheros 5212: mem=0xcffb0000, irq=11
Next:
The ad-hoc mode is a bit buggy right now (but it should be fixed soon..) i read the mailing list and issue seems to be on the way. So I decided to
use as an AP (madwifi support the master mode). There isn’t any hostap like on 54g card but a good old fashion bridge can do the stuff.
echo -n "Creating bridge" brctl addbr br0 brctl addif br0 ath0 brctl addif br0 eth0 echo "Done" echo -n "Configuring interfaces" ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0 ifconfig ath0 0.0.0.0 ifconfig br0 192.168.1.20 route add default gw 192.168.1.1 echo -n "Done"
Test:
First pings take a long time, since the bridge use the cards in promiscous mode, and brigde packet that are usefull, so building the ARP table can be a bit slow.. but it’s works perfectly ..
Important notes:
- Don’t try to build bridges w/ ndiswrapper since i won’t work.. due to the hack of promisc i think
- The prism54 seems to have trouble the Managed mode, it ask for a dissociation when you try to make it work w/ an hostap or a bridge like me . I use a old cisco (11mb) right now on my new Netgear AP :)
I have a D-Link DWL-G650 and it uses the Atheros chipset. Currently, I’m using the Madwifi CVS (as of 20040308) module. I enable ethernet bridging, but it doesn’t bridge. I’m actually bridging ath0, eth1, and eth2. br0 works as a device that I can route traffic with, but I cannot send traffic from/to any of the internal interfaces (i.e. ath0<->eth1, eth1<->eth2, etc). Did you encounter these problems at all? Also, as I understand it, rules in iptables cannot affect traffic passed via the bridge w/o using ebtables. Is this correct? I just want to rule that out.
Thanks
In fact, after the bridge is up, ican’t use ath0 or eth0 directly, all your traffic should pass thought the bridge. You only use an interface br0. So you need to setup routes to feet w/ that.
By default you shouldn’t use iptables at all. The setup w/ iptables is complety different, as your eth0 become a masquerading (nat) interface not a bridge. (is it clear ?)
i am very new to all of this. i just installed opensuse on my computer. as far as chip set goes, i have an intel celeron chipset. i have a netgear card, wg311, and of course want it to work on my system. let me get this right …
i have to have a certain chipset to do all of this ? intel wont cut it ? and also, i cant just download the driver, burn it on a disk and then put it on my other computer, thats running opensus, then put the netgear cd in and install ?