how to get Orinoco wireless to scan with WAG?

[peppyy]

Here is what I have, (Other than a really nasty cold at the moment). I have a couple laptops set up with these cards and antennas for travel, (My daughter is moving to California), and I want her to be able to connect from her car on the roundabout trip there.

I have no problems setting up the cards that require ndiswrapper to use wag and scan and connect but I cant seem to get my automatically recognized cards to do the same.

I have a couple Orinoco gold classic (and differently branded, same chipset) cards. Puppy treats these cards as a standard "wired" connection during boot and connects fine to my wireless router as eth0. I bring up a terminal and use iwconfig while we drive around and I an able to get the essid's and signal strength of networks. I can connect to the unincripted ones (that is all I need) by running the autodhcp in the regular eithernet wizzard but not with wag.

I know that I am missing something simple (Blame it on the foggy head cold) but there has to be a easy way to do this.

Thanks.

[keenerd]

Iwconfig can only give you the signal strength of the network you're currently connected to. Actual scanning is done through "iwlist INTERFACE scan".

Possible problem: This operation is not supported by your card/driver.
Try "iwlist eth0 scan" and see what happens.

Another possible problem: WAG isn't autodetecting your wireless interface. Does "eth0" appear in /proc/net/wireless? If not, you'll have to manually specify the interface in the wag-conf file.

What feedback does WAG give you?

[rarsa]

Last time I checked, orinoco drivers DID NOT support scanning.

I think that there are some patches to the driver to support scanning, I haven't tried.

Just google 'orinoco drivers scanning' and you will get some leads.

[peppyy]

proc/net/wireless reports

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Inter-| sta-|   Quality        |   Discarded packets               | Missed | WE
 face | tus | link level noise |  nwid  crypt   frag  retry   misc | beacon | 16
  eth0: 0000   57.  224.  168.       0      0      0      0      0        0

And WAG reports ths following

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wireless card not active
wireless card not responding
                                                           
no module loaded
dhcpcd running
wifi-beta installed

eth0 enabled
no IP assigned to eth0
access point aquired
no internet ping test

0 wireless network(s) detected
0 open network(s) detected

Connected to:
eth0      IEEE 802.11-DS  ESSID:"home"  Nickname:"HERMES I"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412GHz  Access Point: 00:E0:98:DE:D3:33  
          Encryption key:off
          Link Quality:54/92  Signal level:-34 dBm  Noise level:-88 dBm

But this is on an older version of puppy so I might have to try it on 1.0.5 and see if it is different.

[peponpuptop4]

You guys have made Puppy so easy to install things I have drawn a blank on how to install drivers lol.

Code: Select all

wireless card active
wireless card responding
                                                           
no module loaded
dhcpcd running
wifi-beta not installed

eth0 enabled
wireless ip: 192.168.1.39
access point acquired
wireless gateway found
no internet ping test

no wireless networks detected
error when scanning

Connected to:
eth0      IEEE 802.11-DS  ESSID:"home"  Nickname:"HERMES I"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412GHz  Access Point: 00:E0:98:DE:D3:33  
          Encryption key:off
          Link Quality:58/92  Signal level:-36 dBm  Noise level:-94 dBm

It says that eth0 does not support scanning and I was guessing that was because it treats the card as a "wired" card. Perhaps I will try using ndiswrapper and the xp drivers from the website.

[Guest]

No luck with the drivers for xp unless I am using the wrong file.

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# ndiswrapper -l
Installed ndis drivers:
2802w   driver present 
airplus driver present 
bcmwl5  driver present 
bcmwl5a driver present 
gplus   driver present 
mrv8k51 driver present 
mrv8ka51        driver present 
net8180 driver present 
neta3ab driver present 
netadm11        driver present 
netdlwl driver present 
ntpr11ab        driver present 
rt2500  driver present 
w22n51  driver present 
w70n51  driver present 
[b]wlluc48b        invalid driver![/b]

Is there a way to change the interface to wlan0 so that wag would recognize it that way? or am I beating a dead horse

[rarsa]

Please read my previous post

NOT ALL DRIVERS SUPPORT SCANNING.

[peppyy]

I am sorry. I didn't mean to make anyone angry

I guess you can only use the scan in winows an that ain't gonna happen. I guess I am back to the linksys or networkeverywhere card and no external antenna. I was just being stubborn and hoping.

Thanks.

[rarsa]

I am sorry. I didn't mean to make anyone angry

No, I am sorry, I used it as emphasis not anger. I was in a hurry. I should have used bold.

Please accept my apologies if it was interpreted like angry shouting.

I just wanted to really call your attention to my previous post where I indicate that there seems to be a patched version of the drivers that supports scanning.

[peppyy]

Thanks, I have found several updated drivers for oronoco_cs.c but can't seem to get them to load. I only know how to do that with the eithernet wizard and load a custom driver.

It may well be that I need to update the firmware on the cards and of course that too is only available for a winows machine.

[rarsa]

My card uses the orinoco drivers, so I can try. What drivers are you trying? (a link to the download would be great).

I haven't tried because I only use wireless at home where I don't broadcast the essid.

[peppyy]

The original search took place on PupTop4 which isn't here at the moment

I am pretty sure this was listings for the patch.

http://www.cs.umd.edu/~moustafa/morinoco/morinoco.html

An I'll be darned if I can find the actuall file again. Ahhhhhhhh, Here they are!

http://ozlabs.org/people/dgibson/dldwd/

[rarsa]

I tried to compile the drivers, but I think I need the kernel module headers or something like that

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/lib/modules/2.4.29/build: No such file or directory.

I'll investigate.

[Guest]

Thanks, this is exciting

[peppyy]

That was me by the way. To many PupTops to log in all the time.

I know that is no excuse

[peppyy]

What is the location of the existing orinoco_cs driver?
I would think if it were replaced with an updated one that that one would load automatically instead. Right?

If the kernel headers match wouldn't it be interchangeable?

Sorry I haven't been around lately but it is a long sleepless story.

[tempestuous]

peppyy & rarsa,
As you have possibly seen from other threads, I am going through my collection of dedicated Linux wireless drivers at the moment to add some new ones, update the ones that don't work, and update some documentation. So I thought I might as well sort out the Orinoco situation.
I have been trying various Linux wifi sniffers recently (since Keenard's WAG doesn't support my linux-wlan-ng driver) and found some good information about the orinoco patches at the AirSnort website - http://airsnort.shmoo.com/orinocoinfo.html
Guess what ... all versions after 0.13e support monitor mode. No patch required.
The latest version is 0.15rc3, and since it doesn't look like a stable release I downloaded the CVS source instead, from http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/orinoco/
All modules compiled easily, and there's now a few extra modules, including one for Orinoco USB devices.
There's also a Prism USB module, but I just tried it with my Prism2.5-based D-Link DWL-122 adaptor and it doesn't work. For Prism devices, linux-wlan-ng or HostAP drivers are really better options.

I don't know how to get the Orinoco driver(s) into monitor mode, except for this information from the AirSnort site -
The following command is used to enable monitor mode:
iwpriv eth0 monitor <m> <c>
m - one of the following
0 - disable monitor mode
1 - enable monitor mode with Prism2 header info prepended
to packet (ARPHRD_IEEE80211_PRISM)
2 - enable monitor mode with no Prism2 info (ARPHRD_IEEE80211)
c - channel to monitor

To this end, I have included iwpriv in the orinoco driver package.
Be aware that these drivers will OVERWRITE the existing orinoco/hermes modules in Puppy.
You might want to test initially with a liveCD.

[keenerd]

Keenard's WAG doesn't support my (tempestuous) linux-wlan-ng driver

Could I have some details so I could try to fix this?

Can the card output a list of access points from the command line? If so, the fix will be easy.

[tempestuous]

Good question keenerd. You prompted me to find out.

linux-wlan-ng is unique amongst wireless drivers in that it doesn't use iwconfig, because linux-wlan-ng doesn't support the Linux wireless extensions interface. So it has its own configuration utility, wlanctl-ng. This utility has an amazing number of command options, and documentation is hard to come by. I had to discover the commands to connect to my wireless router from Google searches. Same with commands to make an ad-hoc connection, and I have not tested this yet.
So just now, I Googled for commands to achieve a site survey. This is the result -

wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_ifstate ifstate=enable
wlanctl-ng wlan0 dot11req_scan bsstype=any bssid=00:00:00:00:00:00 scantype=both probedelay=0 / channellist="01:02:03:04:05:06:07:08:09:0a:0b:0c:0d:00" minchanneltime=200 maxchanneltime=1000 ssid=""
wlanctl-ng wlan0 dot11req_scan_results bssindex=0 ## (then 1, 2, etc for each detected AP)

I just tried these commands, and they do work.

Regarding wifi sniffer applications, Prism2-based adaptors are not supported by several because of the wireless extensions issue. But Prism2 is a common chipset and there are some sniffers that were designed specifically to support it. In theory, PrismStumbler should be a prime choice, but I can't get it to work. I have had partial success with ssidsniff, airfart, and AirSnort, but the real winner has been Kismet.


peppyy,
Does the new orinoco driver now work with WAG?

[peppyy]

I have attemped to set it up running 1.0.5 live without any luck yet but I just got one of my demo-pups back and it is a different breed so perhaps I will have better luck with that one.

It is quite possible that my card's firmware needs to be upgraded and I haven't found a safe way to do that with Puppy yet. I don't have any winows machines with pcmcia so I may be stuck as far as the gold classic goes.

I was looking into other cards with an MC connector for an external antenna but they all seem to have the same basic chipset, just different firmware.

I have a couple other cards that I should check out though. The wpc11 v3 linksys cards seem to be plugn-play and I believe they use the prism2 but I would have to look it up. I also have a dell true mobil b/g and a netgear ma401, an orinoco/proxim a/b that I think is wavelan and a garbage gigafast 11b that doesn't even work right with the xp drivers.

Since it looks like I am not going anywhere after all, I should be able to do some testing soon.

I really want to thank everyone for all the work they are doing to make wireless so user friendly in Puppy. Puppy is so well suited for portables that it is the perfect choice for people on the go.