"most" Atheros wifi cards work?
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Partly because of keeping up with the OS updates.
No, largely because FreeBSD is so far behind on wireless drivers. Now that Atheros has hired Adrien, one of the guys who was doing a lot of work on it to begin with, that should improve greatly. FreeBSD 9.0 is a tad better with that, but it's such a mess with a number of other things we're far more dependent on than wireless that it doesn't matter, we can't fix its issues in a timely manner, and 2.1 will be released in May. We stick with what's best for the vast majority of uses, wireless is a tiny fraction of users. And it wouldn't matter if wireless did work if 10 other things required for a functional firewall didn't. We don't stay a bit behind the most current releases because we don't care about updating or don't want to, we use the releases that are the best fit for our users' purposes at that time.
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The wireless N bits in the GUI are there because there is a Marvell wireless card (I have one, using the mwl driver) that supports the N protocols but not N speed rate control. So it's perfectly valid on that card to set it up for N, and it works fine, but will never attain more than G speeds.
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The wireless N bits in the GUI are there because there is a Marvell wireless card (I have one, using the mwl driver) that supports the N protocols but not N speed rate control. So it's perfectly valid on that card to set it up for N, and it works fine, but will never attain more than G speeds.
Thanks for the explaination Jimp. What is the model of this Marvell card? Also, does work fine in both AP and Infrastructure mode?
Best
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The card is a Marvell 88W8363. I got a couple off eBay a year or two ago for something like $5-10 each when I saw the mwl driver was doing N already, only to find out about the lack of rate control after I already had them. It supports multi-WAP and multi-Infrastucture, though I did not try those myself (one of the other Devs did). It was supposed to support up to 16 VAPs where the Atheros cards only did 4, but I think in practice it was limited to 8. So you could have 8 APs and 8 client instances all running off that one card.
Not sure how well that works in actual production, but with limited testing the results were positive.
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Thanks, very interesting. I have been jumping up and down all over the forum to find a list of working hardware (specially with multiple WAP support but couldn't find any).
I think it would server right, if a wiki page or a sticky was posted to show the list of current supported hardware with status "Full Support" or "Partial Support".
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That's what the spreadsheet is for.
There are tons of models listed on the second tab.But if people want to submit known working chips/models, I'll add them.
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Do you know the card model is?
WikiDevi lists only 1 miniPCI card with that chip.Steve
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No, I don't know the model, the only number anywhere on it that I remember is the chip. Searching on that gives 4-5 results on eBay still though.
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On my cards, I had to make a change to the driver source like the patch on this ticket I posted to get multi-AP mode to actually be useful: http://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/1104
Without that, every AP on the card gets the same BSSID, which makes it impossible to connect to all but one of the hosted APs. -
I think there has been a surge of people asking for Wireless devices compatible with pfSense […] All other comparable open-source projects do better than pfSense in this area.
I'm sorry, but this bit made me smile. I initially attempted to set up my router-firewall-box as a SmoothWall box, because I'd had prior experience with SmoothWall. When I went on their forums and asked about wireless support, I literally got laughed at.
Back to the topic at hand, if anyone's looking for a wireless Mini PCI-e card to work with their pfSense box, I can recommend the Atheros AR5BXB92 (AR9280 chipset). It can be had for $15 on eBay, comes in a half-card format for those using book-size systems like myself, and is quite literally plug-and-play. I plugged it into my box, booted up, logged into the web interface, added a new LAN interface, and the LAN interface popped in, already pointed at ath0. From there, I just had to configure the LAN interface with the appropriate wireless parameters (SSID, encryption, etc) and was off and running.
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If you are comparing to a project like OpenWrt, pfSense is definitely lacking in some wireless features compared to it (802.11n is the most mentioned one, but there are some other things lacking). OpenWrt is actually a quite capable system with support for lots of different configuration types. While I don't like how some of its configuration screens are set up in the web GUI, there are also some I do like the way they are set up (in trunk version). The differences in wireless (at least on ath) may become less in the pfSense version after 2.1, which is probably when the new FreeBSD wireless code will get included. I don't think it will be available for 2.1, unfortunately.
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I would consider SmoothWall, IPCop, and the like to be more "comparable" products; full-featured firewall distributions that run on standard x86 architecture. Of these products, I've found pfSense to have some of the best wireless support.
OpenWRT and its kin are designed for embedded systems and (to my knowledge) can't be run on an x86 box, so comparing them to pfSense… well maybe it's not quite apples and oranges, but it's at least apples and pears.
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You can run openwrt and dd-wrt on X86.
http://downloads.openwrt.org/backfire/10.03.1-rc6/x86_generic/I've used it for experimental purposes.
Steve
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Last I had tried SmoothWall or IPCop (I'll admit it was a while ago), neither had the kinds of NAT or firewall options that pfSense or OpenWrt have. That it has x86 support and features overall somewhat comparable to pfSense (especially with some of the optional OpenWrt packages) is why I was comparing it to pfSense. Note that one thing it does not have is AMD64 support - likely there is little interest in running OpenWrt on computers with lots of memory.
btw, OpenWrt is officially with that capitalization now, not OpenWRT, just for reference.
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I'm sorry, but this bit made me smile. I initially attempted to set up my router-firewall-box as a SmoothWall box, because I'd had prior experience with SmoothWall. When I went on their forums and asked about wireless support, I literally got laughed at.
You probably didn't really look or tested other opensource projects. There are few that do much better than pfSense in wireless department but again pfSense is my choice and I want it to better - no wait, be the BEST. It's important to compare feature by feature and not overall or other features when deciding at enhancements. Anyhow….minor details are not important.
Have you tried the Atheros AR5BXB92 with multiple AP and Infrastructure modes? Can you please post what is the maximum of each supported? By the way, is this the a/b/g/n card like this one:
http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Apple-Atheros-AR9280-AR5BXB92-802-11AGN-Mini-Pci-e-Wifi-300Mbp-dual-band-N-card-/250915087322?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3a6bb463da#ht_3406wt_1185Jimp: The card you were referring to is this one?:
http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Marvell-88W8363-Mini-PCI-Wireless-Card-300Mbps-802-11N-/230614780239?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item35b1b6494f#ht_2033wt_986^^^^ Seems like a Chinese replica if I am not wrong.
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Yeah that's the card. Mine came on the slow boat from China but it did work. Looked like the two I got were system pulls, not "new" knock-offs.
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The cards listed here with same chip have an extra 2nd chip as well. What does that mean? Would that be a problem if I opt for one from Apple, Samsung, CyberTAN, or Buffalo. All show no drivers for Linux.
Thanks
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Not sure really, I just grabbed two that had the 88W…. chip and they were both OK, though I don't have any in production.
