@johnpoz:
Prob be cheaper and easier if you really want 1 box to do a case modification and take the guts of these, or put them in a new little case and attach to the top of your box if you can not put them in side.. The antennas detach so you could prob mount the antennas to your case and if there is any room inside the case put these inside and have a ethernet connection.. You would have to work out the details if you want it all in the same box. But this prob be easier and faster and better speeds than what your dicking with ;)
Unfortunately it wasn't my decision to wrestle with these wireless cards :\ Fortunately, I set up one of the boxed with the guts of a particular OEM's AP unit and got the approval to go ahead with this setup. Now it's off to figure out heat dissipation and case modeling.
@Per:
Would be interesting to hear what you have tried.
Man, attempting to get a solid setup had been up uphill battle going nowhere. Originally, we had an atheros card that only occasionally gave the ath beacon error. The speed was terrible, and we also found out about the limitation of 10.3. We started up some demo units, and got all different cards to test out (Atheros, Apple, Intel, Realtek). Eventually, I began just building new kernels with either the 2.3 or 2.4 drivers. The apple card, surprisingly, worked the best on the 2.3 box and a little bit on the 2.4 boxes. After working with the 2.4 atheros driver for a while it became pretty clear that it just didn't like pfSense at all. So, after getting down into the different drivers, we rolled back to just 2.3 stable. Lo and behold, the cards had started working worse. The beacon error was joined by the "Ath_tx_default_comp". We quickly found that the disconnects were linked to the amount of traffic on the particular wireless network.
In short, the instability of wireless in 2.3 is still present in 2.4 and, because of the efforts being made to get 2.4 released, any errors in 2.3 will probably be there indefinitely. If you want to get one working, you'll most likely have to get your hands dirty with the drivers and the pfsense kernel itself.
