Pfsense access point mode and WDS
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firstly does pfsense with a wifi card and setup as access point support WDS (Wireless distribution system)?
i have issues where im using a tplink range extender, just got it today, it has 2 range extender modes, one with WDS and other without and im using static mac id/ip pairs on dhcp. if i setup as range extender without WDS then it would proxy everything so the mac id of wifi clients would change to that of tplink and then due to static mac id/ip pairs set (static arp) on pfsense it wouldnt allow to surf untill static arp is disabled. now if is et the tplink in repeater with WDS mode then this would only extend the wifi range of pfsense without proxying anything and my wifi signal seems to get amplified but when wifi clients conenct to this strong signal then either they dont get an ip from pfsense or if they manually set ip then r unable to surf and its same with and without static arp, so could it be that pfsense doesnt support WDS mode
the tplink is set to static ip with dhcp disabled as i want pfsense to give out ips
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I say this in the nicest way -
1. Don't use pfSense as an AP. Last I checked, FreeBSD doesn't even support 802.11n much less any advanced features.
2. Don't use repeaters, they kill your network capacity. I use WDS-AP - WDS-STA pairs for wireless links, but never repeaters. Run network cable if you can, if not find equipment that'll mesh on 5GHz and provide access on 2.4GHz (there's quite a few choices out there)
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im aware of pfsense as AP isnt great at all and no wireless n support so far but i just need to use in pfsense as its a small setup with very few clients and few suffering from low wifi signal in the last room of the floor so i got this tplink repeater and in proxy mode works fine but in WDS it doesnt work at all so might be FreeBSD not supporting it or mayb i havent configured the tplink properly but i doubt it not setup properly, pfsense system log also doesnt say anything going wrong also
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WDS is not yet supported
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not supported in pfsense or freebsd?
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pfSense.
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any plans to add it any time soon or would it be easy as some GUI change only to support it?
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https://wiki.freebsd.org/WifiMesh
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any plans to add it any time soon or would it be easy as some GUI change only to support it?
Yeah GUI additions mostly.
Since the underlying software is already there.Might be needing some hw testing from different vendors to see what issues come from that aswell.
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i have atheros chip and on another machine i have a ralink chip but freebsd doesnt recognize it, probably others have other chips so they can help also test it out
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regarding the below error, i read on some other sites other suffering the same and there was some patch for it in v0.9.4 in madwifi drivers so does pfsense use that or an older driver as currently changing the speed and duplex for wifi still fails
hostapd: ath0_wlan0: IEEE 802.11 Fetching hardware channel/rate support not supported. -
So wait. You have read what will resolve it (updating your drivers) and haven't tried that yet?
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regarding the below error, i read on some other sites other suffering the same and there was some patch for it in v0.9.4 in madwifi drivers so does pfsense use that or an older driver as currently changing the speed and duplex for wifi still fails
The madwifi drivers are Linux drivers. pfsense is based on FreeBSD which is not Linux.
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So wait. You have read what will resolve it (updating your drivers) and haven't tried that yet?
It's not as simple as "updating your drivers" like in the windows or even linux world. In FreeBSD the drivers are part of the base package and you can't really "update" them. pfSense 2.0.x is based on FreeBSD 8.1 and has certain drivers whereas pfSense 2.1 is based on FreeBSD 8.3 and has newer drivers. And no you can't just upgrade FreeBSD and keep pfSense working.
Joel
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im curious what drivers does pfsense use and their version for atheros chips