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Found: A USB WLAN adapter for OpenBSD wardriving

Submitted by anelson on Wed, 2007-07-11 09:45
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I’ve previously lamented the flakiness of the uath USB Atheros WLAN driver in OpenBSD 4.1. I’m happy to report that I’ve found a suitable alternative: the Ralink 2500-based Alfa AWUS036S.

It’s footprint is a dongle, but it comes with a threaded RP-SMA connector with a lame-ish 2dBi antenna that can be easily swapped out for that 25dBi monster you won’t admit to the FCC that you have. It’s also cheap; I got mine on eBay from Data Alliance, for a mere $36.

As per my requirements, I can boot up an OpenBSD 4.1 VMWare virtual machine, give the VM focus, insert the USB wlan adapter (it seems you have to do this while logged in as admin; it never works as a non-privileged user with VMWare Workstation 6.0), and VMware automatically exposes the adapter to the VM, which picks it up as rum0. From there, Kismet works fine.

If you’re a lamer and prefer the dick-holding comfort of Linux, that’s known to work too.

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uath_firmware didn't detect my USB-wifi SMCWUSBT-G2 ???

Submitted by Kaxpolox (not verified) on Fri, 2008-01-18 13:10.

Hallo ..

i have trouble with my USB-WIFI i’v got SMCWUSBT-G2 with chipset Atheros. After installing UATH_firmware, my OPENBSD-4.1 still didn’t know the USB. it just showing “ugen0 at uhub0” when atthched.

what should i do …? please give me solution … :)

thanks a lot …

INFO: my wifi-usb information: model : SMCWUSBT-G2 part-no : 98-012084-607 interface : USB 2.0 standard : IEEE 802.11b/g datarate : 108 Mbps frek : 2.4 GHz chipset : Atheros AR5523 + AR2414

When attached: (it’s same with dmesg results)

ugen0 at uhub0 port 1

ugen0: Atheros Communications Inc AR5523, rev 2.00/0.01, addr 2 uhub1 at uhub0 port 2 uhub1: vendor 0x0e0f VMware Vrtual USB Hub, rev 1.10/1.00, addr 3 uhub1: 7 ports with 7 removable, self powered

“usbdevs -v” results:

usbdevs -v

Controller /dev/usb0: addr 1: full speed, self powered, config 1, UHCI root hub(0x0000), Intel(0x8086), rev 1.00 port 1 addr 2: full speed, power 500 mA, config 1, AR5523(0x4507), Atheros Communications Inc(0x083a), rev 0.01 port 2 addr 3: full speed, self powered, config 1, VMware Virtual USB Hub(0x0002), vendor 0x0e0f(0x0e0f), rev 1.00 port 1 powered port 2 powered port 3 powered port 4 powered port 5 powered port 6 powered port 7 powered #

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anelson's picture

You’re not going to like it.

Submitted by anelson on Fri, 2008-03-14 18:24.

You’re not going to like it. My fix is don’t waste your time w/ the flaky uath drivers; get something based on a chipset with better support.

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