For reasons I wrote extensively about then lost when I accidentally navigated away from my blog posting form, I’m trying to get a USB wlan adapter going with an OpenBSD VM running kismet. I thought the Engenius EUB-362 EXT with its Atheros USB chipset would be just the ticket; after all, the new [uath(4)](http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=uath&sektion=4) driver says it supports such chipsets, and the EUB-362 has an RP-SMA connector and 200mw of transmit power!

Sadly, it doesn’t work. Badly. kismet fails to start with Cannot set ifmedia: Device not configured because the SIOCSIFMEDIA ioctl fails for the device. If I modify pcapsource.cc line 2876 so kismet ignores that failure, my efforts are rewarded with a kernel panic in the uath driver. Upgrading to the -current branch as of 28 June 2007 didn’t help.

I should’ve headed the admonitions about the uath driver being a work in progress, but I really wanted that 200mw transmit power. Stupid me.

I’ve now pinned my hopes on the Alfa AWUS036S, which is based on the more stable Ralink rt2500 chipset. I run three rt2500-based PCI cards in an OpenBSD box at home, and while it does panic from time to time, it’s usually good for a day or so at least. What’s more, I have proof that the AWUS036S works with aircrack-ng on Linux, so even if the ural OpenBSD driver is unstable, I can switch to Ubuntu.

Sure, I could post a bug to the bugs list and go back and forth, but it’s not worth it to me.