@wallabybob:

The TP-Link TL-WN321G is a "G" device, supports AP mode and is supported in pfSense 1.2.3 and 2.0.

The Tenda W311U is a 150  MHz "N" device supported by the run driver in pfSense2.0 and supports AP mode. I have both of these devices and they give satisfactory performance around my two floor house. I have not run any sustained downloads or uploads over either device.

The Tenda W322U is allegedly a 300MHz version of the W311U so should also be supported by the run driver in pfSense 2.0 but I have no experience with it.

this is a great idea bob, im planning for this stuff - tenda w311u.
if ever i have this stuff i will extend the cabling for this, doing some DIY…^^
instead of using router which gives me headache...lol

Uncheck the box to block private networks under the wan interface. There is a good chance pfsense would be dropping traffic on the wan interface if it's behind another router. That said anything behind the firewall wouldn't be seen by wireless clients unless you do port forwarding.

You want bridge mode though so it acts as a transparent firewall. No need for the box to do NAT if it's already behind another router. If you look through the firewalling section on the forums there should be several threads about how to setup a transparent firewall.

Your NIC is probably supported in pfSense 2.0.

As best I could find out, those devices contain a Ralink chipset supported by the run driver in pfSense 2.0. Some caveats:

Some assemblers change the chipset without changing the model number, making it difficult to determine the chipset from the model number.

I have been using a NIC with similar chipset on pfSense 2.0 successfully for some months. I have it configured as an AP. If I recall correctly I have seen reports of difficulties when its configured in Infrastructure (associate with a AP) mode. I have no idea if there is still a problem.

You will probably need to tweak the configuration to load the firmware for the Alfa at boot time. Searching the forums for run firmware will probably show a number of posts with a recipe. This tweak is not needed if you plug in the device after the system has booted.

I suggest you build yourself a pfSense system and plug in your Alfa and see what happens. If that is too much hassle ask for recommendations for a USB Wireless LAN NIC to operate in Infrastructure mode. These devices need not be expensive.

It shows the same thing as the screenshot above, just with .253 at the end instead of .254. I just rebooted the AP again and now the webconsole is accessible  ???

Thanks for the help & I'll update this thread if it becomes inaccessible again!

@DamienD:

Hello,

Same problem here…

running pfsense 1.2.3 on ALIX mb

somebody have a solution?

Do you need more infos?

Could it be related to the key rotation value?  http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,32038.0.html

With the default value of 60 It holds up for about 4 days before starting to bug... I changed to 1800 to see if it improves anything.

regards

It has been up for about 88 days without any problem… Seems to be the solution for me at least.

I forgot to say - thatnks for the help on this one guys but i've decided to just stick with my current wireless router - there's just too much messing about to be done to get pfsense working properly - after i got wireless working, VNC stopped working on my internal network

Thanks for updated reply. I have downloaded pfSense 2.0 of 2nd June 2011. And it is working fine. There are some good bug fixes. But as it is concern to the Wireless LAN, not working. I think that this is not the issue with version but i am missing something important in the config way. Kindly guide me. During setup, i am following pfsense Add_WiFi_Interface.swf wing.

With Regards,

Vijay THAkur

@jvin248:

You might want to try the 1.2.3 released version rather than 2 Release Candidate, unless there's a specific feature reason.
Worst case you run from LiveCD using a floppy or USB flash drive to store data while you test it. 
I'm running a couple of sites that way (rather than having a HDD spinning all the time) and it's worked well, one is a Pentium-1 MMX system, the other a Pentium-2 and after initial boot they run in ram.  Stripped down they are somewhere around 15-20watts.

You've got another box on the LAN that is handing out DHCP IP addresses (that overlap).
To fix you either need to find that box and turn it off, use a different IP range, or change one or the other sub-net mask.
If it's all wifi at the office, then this mysterious DHCP box could be one of your neighbor's LAN wifi equipment.

AFAIK there is no 802.11n functionality on any NIC in pfsense, and freebsd is still experimental. I have a DWA-552 (atheros) and it only used G speeds between my phone on FreeBSD 9.0 Current updated to May patches. I believe they are working on it for Freebsd but it may take a while before that makes its way to pfsense.

FWIW the driver for my NIC does not work with WPA / WPA2 unless I have it on FreeBSD 9 and rebuild the kernel to the latest patches. Open and WEP encryption do work at b and possibly G speeds.

At best it will work in "G mode" (max of 54Mbps). It is reported that card has an Atheros chipset so it could work.  I have no experience with that card. I've had good results on both pfSense 1.2.3 and 2.0 with the TP-Link TL-WN651G.

I'm using mostly the wlm54g23 and wlm54sag23 (both atheros based).

If you're looking for N-hardware you're out of luck.
Afaik there is currently no driver support in FreeBSD 8.x

If you search the forum, then you'll find threads describing some N-cards which work, but only in g mode.

The firewalling part is great but there is very little support in FreeBSD for 802.11n cards. So if you're on 802.11g only (like a Ubiquiti XR2) it might be a good choice.

Yeah I don't run DHCP on the WAPs or the forwarders actually. If the WAPs are connected to the same subnet as your DHCP server you shouldn't need a forwarder. With this setup my wireless clients just seamlessly switch over with no loss of connectivity. I can run a ping 192.168.2.1 -t and at worst they will miss one ping.

You can always do what I have done with Pandora and add it to the whitelist on HAVP, then it will skip over just that site and scan everything else you browse.  As a future note, it does the same for almost all streamed media (youtube, slacker, etc.) so I usually add the ones I use to the whitelist on HAVP.

If you're using it purely as an access point it shouldn't limit the number of connections.

Another solution is to install an access point mode capable wifi card in your pfsense box and use it directly.
See: http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Supported_Wireless_Cards

Steve

@wallabybob:

Please post the output of the pfsense command # dmesg.

Have you added a line to /boot/loader.conf.local to have the run firmware loaded at boot time? This is what I use:

$ more /boot/loader.conf.local
runfw_load="YES"
$

This gets the boot loader to load the firmware as a kernel module. If that doesn't happen, on startup the driver wants the firmware but the firmware can't be found because its not present in the kernel and the file system is not yet initialised. If you plug in the run device as the kernel has finished its startup the firmware can be found through the filesystem.

Thank you very much, adding runfw_load="YES" and rebooted.  Detected the usb wifi straight away.  Many thanks.

@llennac:

Hi, on our Boarding School our Internet is distributed over WLAN wich we have to use for a PPPoE connection. Unfortunately the WLAN Router does not Support tcp_window_scaling so every client needs to disable this option otherwise its extremely slow.

Sorry I don't understand your configuration. In particular, I don't understand why a router would be looking inside TCP packets that its routing and take notice of TCP options. Perhaps an annotated diagram would help me.

Thanks - I went with a EW-7711UAn seems to be working fine :)

BSS

(why not just google it? O_o)