ACX100 type wireless boards
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Hello to everybody.
Recently I've got a D-Link DWL-520+ wireless network adapter. Though many might think that it is old but for my application that is more than enough (especially that I got it for free). The problem is that when I've inserted it into the computer I've found out that there are no built-in drivers for it. After googling for drivers I've found that it is an acx100 board type and that there are drivers for it in the FreeBSD ports repository, but no package. So the pfSense on my PC is not a devel edition thus no tools to compile that port even if I get it.
If any one knows how to overcome this without having to format the hard drive again (is it really necesary to format the whole drive when you install pfsense?)Thank you in advance for your responses.
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IMO wireless cards are so cheap and readily available that it's not worth fussing with an unsupported model, especially one that probably doesn't have hostap support. Just go spend the $15 and buy a working one and save yourself the trouble and time.
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Thanks for the reply, but I would have to disappoint you: I live in Moldova. It is a small country that is sometimes considered a town in a nearby country. (total population of aprox 6M people) The thing is that IT isn't great here and the cheapest WiFi cards start at 30$ (TP-Link @ 54Mbps) and a normal (average) salary at about 200-300$ do you still think that it isn't worth trying to attach a card even though it isn't supported?
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I don't mean to have offended you, usually the cost of the time involved in getting this kind of thing working far exceeds the cost of just replacing it, but in your case that might not be the case.
The easiest way to build modules for use in pfSense is to install a vanilla FreeBSD on another computer of the same version that the pfSense you are using is built on. For 1.2.3-RC3 that would be 7.2-RELEASE. You can then build the kernel module (file.ko) via ports (it should end up in /boot somewhere), copy it to the pfSense in the same location and kldload it. I did this a while ago for glxsb.ko and it worked fine, though I can't remember if I had to find the matching pfSense kernel configuration and build a kernel with it on the 'devel' machine to get it to work. I don't think that should be necessary, but I'm really not a FreeBSD expert, perhaps someone else can comment. It was possible to get it working without too much trouble though.
On a positive note, hostap support is supposed to work, though some features are unsupported.
Good luck.
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Thank you for your advice, I will try that method sortly, hope that it will work fine.