I recently did a wireless project to cover 60 acres.  The equipment used was from Engenius.  We used a combination of EOC-2611 for outdoor coverage and bridging where necessary and EAP-9550 for the indoor coverage. We also used 8.5db omni antennas for most of the outdoor 2611s

Just a note, I don't believe that the ndisgen drivers support access point mode, only infrastructure mode. So if you are hoping to use that wireless card as an access point, making the drivers in that way won't make it happen.

Please do not cross-post between boards on the forums.

There are many mini-pci cards that work in an ALIX. Most any card that has an atheros chipset should work. Check netgate.com and see what they are selling there in combination with their ALIX boards, any of those should work.

PCI :)

@kew:

I use a Atheros AR5007EG on the plate D945GSEJT
AP mode working properly.

Looks really interesting!
And on what software are you running that on?
the 1.2.3 or the 2.0 ?

I was hoping there would be some sort of flag that would allow indicate traffic that used the WFD method and therefore allow construction of a designated ruleset for WFD traffic.

Your configuration doesn't sound correct.  I suggest you bridge OPT1 with LAN (and not LAN with OPT1) and set OPT1 type to Static (not DHCP) and don't assign OPT1 an IP address. (Bridging with LAN effectively means OPT1 and LAN share LAN's IP address.)

I have a WLAN card bridged with LAN as described above and it works fine though I did have some troubles with two different Windows XP clients getting an IP address through DHCP. I tweaked the registry on the clients to fix that.

The settings are in the GUI in 2.0

@wallabybob:

@verta:

I was really after an explanation as to why my first rule didn't allow DHCP through, I'm guessing this was because the bridge is seen as BRIDGE0 -> LAN rather than WLAN -> LAN, but needed confirmation on this :)

Without the log message and exact form of the firewall rules its hard to be certain why DHCP wasn't allowed through the firewall.

Did you reset firewall states after changing the rules the first time? (See Diagnostics -> States, click on Reset States tab.)

I did indeed reset the states after making the firewall changes; I'll set the rules back to how they were initially and monitor the firewall logs to see what is being blocked. Thanks again wallabybob :)

Have you tried a pfSense 2.0 BETA snapshot build? It uses a newer version of FreeBSD which has more up to date device drivers than pfSense 1.2.3.

I use a Atheros AR5007EG mini PCIe on the plate D945GSEJT
AP mode working properly.

I am using pfsense 1.2.3

@danswartz:

I am confused, I guess.  The original thread referred to using a wireless router as an AP, with pfsense still as the gateway.  If you are trying to do something else, you should start your own thread, not hijack one describing a totally different scenario ;(

You were just confused! The question that I asked was germane to topic… Specifically, using the wireless AP to provide LAN access to pfsense, and further to ascertain whether pfsense would provide the IP addresses to both the wired and wireless clients. Everything is was just an overview of what I was trying to do, and why I had not tried to achieve the goal beforehand.

@kcallis:

Another wireless device that I am curious about is the Alfa AWUS036NH. Any word about getting that one working?

According to http://linux-wless.passys.nl/ the Alfa AWUS036NH has the same chipset as the Tenda W311U which is supported by the FreeBSD run driver which is in pfSense 2.0 BETA but not in pfSense 1.2.3. I have a Tenda W311U which I have working with recent pfSense 2.0 BETA snapshots.

Note that some suppliers of USB WiFi NICs change the chipset without changing the model number. The referenced web page is a best effort list based on what people have reported.

@wallabybob:

@kcallis:

So, athough the wi0 interface is seen at boot time (from the console), there is still a need to add it via the web interface?

Yes, unless you reboot and do it from the startup menu (item 1).

pfSense supports a few different USB wireless devices but not all USB WiFi devices. Its reasonably likely your Netgear USB WiFi device is not supported. What model is it and what revision? (Or you could just plug it in and see if the kernel recognises it as a WiFi device.)

I made my changes to the the WAN interface and the wireless information. When I reboot, the WAN never connects to the ClearSPOT. Furthermore, I keep getting a wi0: device timeout every couple of minutes. I tried to set the WAN to a static address and still no go… Looking at STATUS: Wireless, my SSID never shows up, although I do see a couple of wireless devices that show on ADDR section. I am at a loss...

--- As a side test, I decided to use pfsense little brother to see if I could get things working. So in went monowall 1.2.3-RELEASE, to see where things might go. After a 10 minute wait, I was connected to the ClearSPOT device as the WAN, and my Linksys WRT160nl for the LAN side. After a couple hiccups, life was once again pleasant. So I thought I could go back and just re-do everything that I did on monowall and do it on pfsense. Although pfsense can find the wireless card in my laptop (Lucent 802.11b card), I can never get it to associate. So after sitting around playing with it for a bit, I went back to monowall, and called it a day.

Yes i know! I have a secound WLAN in my business named with a nother SSID and if i connect to this i get a IP from the PFSENSE.(thats how i set it up).

But if i connect to the pfsense WLAN it doesnot work.

The interesting thing is that every XP Notebook works. And every Vista or Win7 Notebooks doesnt.

=?????? ???

I suggest you save yourself some trouble and buy a supported card that also supports access point mode. I'm pretty sure that in the last couple of months I have posted a list of cards supported in pfSense and supporting Access Point mode and available where I live for under US$30 (after conversion from local currency).

Its often necessary to do a pfSense firewall state reset after changing firewall rules. See Diagnostics -> States, click on Reset States tab.

I don't really know.  It might work well for some, but for me it doesn't because it ends up picking channel 1 for 802.11g, while the middle channels work best on the hardware I have.