On 12/13/2010 04:29 AM, Lists Account wrote:
Hi All,
Summarising, for future reference...
I received some six responses. Overall the feedback was a little
disappointing. Three responses suggested that it would be easier/less
time consuming/more stable to simply connect a consumer access point
device via Ethernet. Of course, I wouldn't learn as much by doing this
:-(. The background to this seems to be mostly issues with the
configuration and stability of drivers e.g. ath and ral.
At least a couple of the respondents are successfully using ALIX boards,
including the desired 2D13. None of the responses related to the
specific wireless devices that I asked about. Some of those mentioned as
having been used included the AR5212 and AR5413 (with ath) and the
RT2561C (ral).
A couple of responses indicated that OpenBSD doesn't support 802.11n. I
got my initial information from the athn manual page. It begins:
...
NAME
athn - Atheros IEEE 802.11a/g/n wireless network device
...
The athn driver provides support for a wide variety of
Atheros 802.11n devices ...
Which I incorrectly took to mean that "n" networking was supported...
However, further down in the same man page, under caveats, it states:
...
The athn driver does not support any of the 802.11n capabilities
offered by the adapters. Additional work is required in
ieee80211(9) before those features can be supported.
...
That should teach me (yet again) to read the whole man page :-)
Cato Auestad provided a very helpful link to a description of his
working (ral based) OpenBSD configuration:
http://bleakgadfly.com/notes/openbsd_wifi.html
There he mentions that support from the hostap daemon - hostapd(8) - is
also necessary for such a configuration. Something else that I hadn't
realised.
So, based on the feedback, it looks like while this might be a fun
project, it could be hard to create a stable "production" access point.
Thanks for all the info.
I use ral(4) in b/g mode, works great for my usage. ~4 users.
the card does flake out every once in a while.
ifconfig ral0 down; ifconfig ral0 up works
hostapd is for more than one AP that share a ssid.
it keeps all the AP synced up, so overkill on mine.
still 4.4 as I have ejabberd running on that box and menisia databases
are a pain and a half to transfer/convert.
overall, very happy running obsd as an ap.
dmesg snip...
OpenBSD 4.4 (GENERIC) #1021: Tue Aug 12 17:16:55 MDT 2008
dera...@i386.openbsd.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC
cpu0: AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor ("AuthenticAMD" 586-class) 451 MHz
cpu0: FPU,V86,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,MCE,CX8,PGE,MMX
real mem = 267939840 (255MB)
avail mem = 250646528 (239MB)
snip...
ral0 at cardbus0 dev 0 function 0 "Ralink RT2560" rev 0x01: irq 12,
address 00:0e:3b:08:45:41
ral0: MAC/BBP RT2560 (rev 0x04), RF RT2525
hostname.ral0
inet 192.168.32.1 0xffffff00 NONE mode 11g chan 8 nwid bervix_castor
mediaopt hostap
sysctl net.inet.ip.forwarding=1
was all that was needed to get it going.
running open as I am always thankfull when I find an open AP so just
returning the favor.
plus a few pf rules to keep "guests" out of the wired network.
authpf does a good job modifing that to allow "real users".
