Help, connection limit giving out wrong IP + Configuring Wireless with PFSense

wallabybob

I don't have all the time in the world for it…

The least troublesome way to do that is probably to buy a $25 Wireless router/AP and connect it to a switch connected to the pfSense LAN interface, following the appropriate how-to on http://doc.pfsense.org.

but if you are after a "learning experience" carry on. You can save the cash by spending hours. Only you can decide if the trade is worth it to you.

Toasticuss

@wallabybob:

@Toasticuss:

I don't have all the time in the world for it…

@wallabybob:

The least troublesome way to do that is probably to buy a $25 Wireless router/AP and connect it to a switch connected to the pfSense LAN interface, following the appropriate how-to on http://doc.pfsense.org.

but if you are after a "learning experience" carry on. You can save the cash by spending hours. Only you can decide if the trade is worth it to you.

Well can you tell me if putting in the hours, the card will even come close to pushing past 50 Mbps on LAN?

I don't think it will, I'm not coding a driver for it either…

Efonnes

@Toasticuss:

Well can you tell me if putting in the hours, the card will even come close to pushing past 50 Mbps on LAN?

I've been able to get around 70 or 80 Mbps from an Alix with a mini PCI card similar to your card, using OpenWrt partly since I wanted something meant to run on a device with flash memory. How fast is your system you are trying this on? (Alix is only 500 MHz) Of course, signal strength is a big part of it, too.

That card you have should be an Atheros-based 802.11n card.

To copy OpenWrt while booted from a LiveCD, download the file to /tmp/ and if your drive is /dev/sda (most likely is), run this command:
dd if=/tmp/openwrt-x86-generic-combined-squashfs.img of=/dev/sda

This will overwrite your installed OS and partition table on the drive, so don't do this if you have anything on the drive you don't want to lose. If there are any other hard drives in the system, you should remove them or at least unplug them first.

When you get it up, the default IP address will be 192.168.1.1. To download packages, you will need to configure the system for internet access - give it a proper IP on your network and assign the gateway IP and DNS server IP. The DHCP server may be turned on for lan by default; you will want to turn it off. The packages you will want to install are kmod-ath9k and wpad.

Toasticuss

@Efonne:

@Toasticuss:

Well can you tell me if putting in the hours, the card will even come close to pushing past 50 Mbps on LAN?

I've been able to get around 70 or 80 Mbps from an Alix with a mini PCI card similar to your card, using OpenWrt partly since I wanted something meant to run on a device with flash memory. How fast is your system you are trying this on? (Alix is only 500 MHz) Of course, signal strength is a big part of it, too.

That card you have should be an Atheros-based 802.11n card.

To copy OpenWrt while booted from a LiveCD, download the file to /tmp/ and if your drive is /dev/sda (most likely is), run this command:
dd if=/tmp/openwrt-x86-generic-combined-squashfs.img of=/dev/sda

This will overwrite your installed OS and partition table on the drive, so don't do this if you have anything on the drive you don't want to lose. If there are any other hard drives in the system, you should remove them or at least unplug them first.

When you get it up, the default IP address will be 192.168.1.1. To download packages, you will need to configure the system for internet access - give it a proper IP on your network and assign the gateway IP and DNS server IP. The DHCP server may be turned on for lan by default; you will want to turn it off. The packages you will want to install are kmod-ath9k and wpad.

Thank you for the quick reply, the system it's going to be on is a normal computer actually, with a Pentium 4… I'll give it a shot, thanks for the quick guide.

Efonnes

That computer should definitely be fast enough to get a high speed if you are getting good enough signal on the connection. If you are getting a sufficient signal, it should be able to at least match 100 Mbps wired ethernet for one-way traffic. I'd try experimenting with different channels. Regardless of the channels used by surrounding networks (or lack thereof), sometimes the antennas have a sweet spot frequency where they just work best. Also wanted to note that 802.11n does not support WEP or TKIP (or at least is not supposed to), so 802.11n may get silently disabled if you tried to use either of those.

Toasticuss

@Efonne:

@Toasticuss:

Well can you tell me if putting in the hours, the card will even come close to pushing past 50 Mbps on LAN?

I've been able to get around 70 or 80 Mbps from an Alix with a mini PCI card similar to your card, using OpenWrt partly since I wanted something meant to run on a device with flash memory. How fast is your system you are trying this on? (Alix is only 500 MHz) Of course, signal strength is a big part of it, too.

That card you have should be an Atheros-based 802.11n card.

To copy OpenWrt while booted from a LiveCD, download the file to /tmp/ and if your drive is /dev/sda (most likely is), run this command:
dd if=/tmp/openwrt-x86-generic-combined-squashfs.img of=/dev/sda

This will overwrite your installed OS and partition table on the drive, so don't do this if you have anything on the drive you don't want to lose. If there are any other hard drives in the system, you should remove them or at least unplug them first.

When you get it up, the default IP address will be 192.168.1.1. To download packages, you will need to configure the system for internet access - give it a proper IP on your network and assign the gateway IP and DNS server IP. The DHCP server may be turned on for lan by default; you will want to turn it off. The packages you will want to install are kmod-ath9k and wpad.

I followed your simple command guide but unfortunately when trying to boot from /dev/sda/ it just sits at this screen -

Any ideas?

Efonnes

That's after copying OpenWrt over? Did you try connecting to 192.168.1.1 with a web browser or telnet? (on a computer configured to be in the same subnet) It probably is just not booting up, but it is possible it is using a serial console instead for some reason and not displaying anything on the screen. Probably unlikely though, because I tested the image in a VM and did get output on the display.

As for what you've tested already, when you used a regular Linux distro did you try different channels when you were testing it?

Toasticuss

@Efonne:

That's after copying OpenWrt over? Did you try connecting to 192.168.1.1 with a web browser or telnet? (on a computer configured to be in the same subnet) It probably is just not booting up, but it is possible it is using a serial console instead for some reason and not displaying anything on the screen. Probably unlikely though, because I tested the image in a VM and did get output on the display.

As for what you've tested already, when you used a regular Linux distro did you try different channels when you were testing it?

It's not getting past the boot loader, and yes I tried channels 1, 6, and 11, which are the standard channels in the US and they all gave the same result.

Efonnes

I suppose it was worth a try. I don't know if there is some other distro you could try that would specifically have more up-to-date or tuned drivers.

Toasticuss

I was finally able to get the wireless up and running on OpenWRT is been working pretty good, the max speed for file transfers is 6MB/s which I thought was kinda low but I can deal with it.

However these connection limit emails are really starting to bug me, I don't know what is telling them to be sent out…