wlan interface (was: first play with new XO 1.5 machines)

[Albert Cahalan]

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 8:45 PM, John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> wrote:

>> I talked with one of the 802.11 experts I know. He's quite sure
>> that there should be no problem on Atheros hardware at least.
>> He has no problem transmitting arbitrary packets at arbitrary
>> times and no problem receiving packets either.

Now I've talked to 5 experts, including one who was involved in
the standardization efforts.

They all agree that it should be possible, but all expect driver
problems. Firmware can ruin things. The recommended setup
is an Atheros chipset with the madwifi drivers. You generally
need to get the firmware into promiscuous (sniffer) mode, which
is not always documented. You'd be essentially doing VAP
(virtual access point) stuff; so VAP is the capability to look for.

Marvell generally doesn't support promiscuous mode, but the XO
firmware did get that feature added at one point. I don't know if
it's still there in the thinmac firmware and the XO 1.5 firmware, but
at least the classic XO setup could do it.