Bug 12152 – pcmcia-cs and gentoo-sources should include CVS aironet driver

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description Joseph Turian 2002-12-14 11:15:09 UTC]

If you see bug 7242, you'll see that pcmcia-cs currently includes the Orinoco 
patch.

pcmcia-cs and gentoo-sources should also include the GPL'ed sourceforge CVS 
aironet drivers for the Cisco Aironet 340/350 series (e.g. Cisco AIR-PCM342) 
of wireless NICs.

The sourceforge drivers are superior to the Cisco drivers and the older 
kernel/pcmcia-cs drivers, as only the CVS drivers support RFMON (monitoring) 
mode.

The drivers are available at:
http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=24926
or, with the command:
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:[e-mail]:/cvsroot/airo-
linux co airo-linux

This driver is stable and I was using it on my debian box before I reformatted 
the disk and installed gentoo.

If you look at the Wireless Tools for Linux 
(http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Tools.html) page of Jean 
Tourrilhes, he describes the difference between the drivers.

He describes the CVS drivers at:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Linux.Wireless.drivers.htm
l#Arlan802

I quote:
"Ben has produced a solid driver for the Aironet card, The driver supports the 
ISA, PCI and Pcmcia cards (both 4500, 4800 & 4800B versions), it looks fairly 
complete and debugged, with a nice /proc interface. The driver also has very 
complete WEP support. 
Ben also told me that the driver was able to recognise the PC3500 cards, but 
more work would be needed there to get it fully working. 

Recently, I've started adding Wireless Extension to this driver. Ben was kind 
enough to integrate properly my work in his driver. Then, Javier Achirica did 
an amazing job of completing Wireless Extension support (power management, spy 
and co), and this driver has one of the most complete Wireless Extension 
support of all. 

Then, Javier Achirica added to the driver the Cisco proprietary API, which 
allow communication with Cisco utilities (see section 23) and, amongst other 
things, flashing new firmware on the card. All this amazing work is in the 
latest release from Ben (1.5). He also wrote a couple of open source utilities 
allowing to dump all the register of the card and to flash new firmwares 
through this API. 

Lately, the driver has been integrated in the Linux kernel (2.4.6 and later) 
and moved to SourceForge. Javier has also added the ability to dump raw 802.11 
frames. Then Javier did extensive work to fix locking (SMP support), add 
monitor mode and scanning support (in version 1.4)."

(i.e. the version in the kernel is not the new version that has monitor mode 
and scanning support)

The Cisco drivers are described at 
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Linux.Wireless.drivers.htm
l#ArlanCisco

I quote:

"Recently, Cisco decided to get more involved with supporting their Wireless 
LAN cards under Linux. Rather than developing an entirely new driver, they 
decided to base their work on Ben's driver (section 21), which is a good idea. 
One of the key person behind this operation was Jim Veneskey. 
The main contribution of Cisco is a proprietary API, which allow communication 
with Cisco utilities and, amongst other things, flashing new firmware on the 
card, and of course a set of utilities which are mostly identical to the 
Windows utilities. They also provided nice installation scripts and did lot's 
of testing of the driver to guarantee its stability (Cisco usually do some 
pretty intensive testing of their products). 

However, even if Cisco regularly synchronise with Ben's driver (section 21), 
this one continues to improve. As they are derived from the same base, it's 
easy to compare the two drivers. In term of features, I guess that Ben's 
driver is winning, because it now has the Cisco API of this driver and more 
complete Wireless Extensions support. However, I believe that Cisco has an 
edge in term of stability. 

I hope that the two drivers will merge rather than diverge, and that changes 
will be propagated from one to the other, so that we have a driver with both 
features and rock solid stability, but only time will tell... Cisco told me 
that they were going to try to catch up with Ben's driver."

http://www.cs.umd.edu/~npetroni/airo.html is another webpage that recommends 
the CVS drivers.

[Comment 1 Grant Goodyear (RETIRED) 2003-02-02 14:49:51 UTC]

I recently had lolo-2.4.20.1 fail on me when trying to modprobe airo
(something about a WIRELESS symbol not being found; I'm afraid I didn't take
good notes at the time).  Downgrading to gentoo-sources-2.4.19-r10 fixed
the problem for me.  I suspect that this bug would also fix the problem
that I had.

CCing to lolo, since it's likely to be his bug to fix

[Comment 2 Tim Yamin (RETIRED) 2003-11-17 08:39:42 UTC]

According to http://pcmcia-cs.sourceforge.net/ftp/SUPPORTED.CARDS this is now in pcmcia-cs[-drivers] so this bug can be closed...

[Comment 3 Joseph Turian 2003-11-18 09:36:47 UTC]

Plasmaroo, please read the original description again.

The issue is not whether the card is included in the kernel source or in pcmcia-cs, but that neither of these versions has monitor mode or scanning support. Only the CVS drivers support RFMON (monitoring) mode.

As such, I am reopening the bug.

[Comment 4 Tim Yamin (RETIRED) 2003-11-20 13:34:54 UTC]

Created attachment 20998 [details]
pcmcia-cs-3.2.5.ebuild

[Comment 5 Tim Yamin (RETIRED) 2003-11-20 13:35:12 UTC]

Can you try the ebuild I've attached and see if it works?

[Comment 6 Tim Yamin (RETIRED) 2003-11-30 05:58:49 UTC]

* ping *

[Comment 7 Tim Yamin (RETIRED) 2003-12-16 15:16:58 UTC]

Can you try the ebuild I've attached to this bug and see if it works? Thanks.

[Comment 8 Andrew Rosborough 2003-12-28 10:28:43 UTC]

plasmaroo, I've been trying to get rfmon compatable drivers for my air352 series pcmcia card for the last 2 days.  I've used many of the different airo.c drivers that I was able to find.  The ones that came with the 2.4.22-r7 kernel (if I recall correctly) showed "echo 'Mode: rfmon' > /proc/driver/aironet/eth0/Config" working but would lock up and in general make the system unstable (I don't think it ever entered promisc mode).  The drivers that your ebuild includes are the ones that I am working on currently.  They were the first I'v had success with in rfmon mode (by echoing Mode: r and then Mode: y to Config).  I'm wondering if it's bad that they're an older version though.  I have tried compiling pcmcia-cs with airo.c 1.56, but there were compilation errors.  Good job on the fix, now I have to find a way to install kismet with out having the panel crash during compile.

[Comment 9 André Brioso 2004-01-21 16:55:12 UTC]

root@muadib abrioso #  emerge -v /usr/portage/sys-apps/pcmcia-cs/pcmcia-cs-3.2.5.ebuild 2>&1 | tee pcmcia-cs-3.2.5.log
eutils
Calculating dependencies  ...done!
>>> emerge (1 of 1) sys-apps/pcmcia-cs-3.2.5 to /
>>> md5 src_uri ;-) pcmcia-cs-3.2.5.tar.gz
>>> md5 src_uri ;-) pcmcia-cs-3.2.5-orinoco-monitor.diff.gz
 
!!! No message digest entry found for file "airo-linux-051101.tar.gz."
!!! Most likely a temporary problem. Try 'emerge rsync' again later.
!!! If you are certain of the authenticity of the file then you may type
!!! the following to generate a new digest:
!!!   ebuild /usr/portage/category/package/package-version.ebuild digest


Should I create a new digest for airo-linux?

[Comment 10 André Brioso 2004-01-21 18:26:33 UTC]

I've created a new digest and tried to emerge the ebuild.

But, unfortunately, PCMCIA was disabled on my kernel (2.6.1-rc1), so I'll recompile it and try again.

[Comment 11 Andrew Rosborough 2004-03-02 21:46:08 UTC]

This is the only driver that I can use to get in promisc mode with kismet.  I have to configure it as source=cisco,eth0,cisco but atleast it works.  Why hasn't this patch been added or an official ebuild been released? I have to rebuild pcmcia-cs every time I 'emerge -u world' because of the newer pcmcia-cs package.

[Comment 12 Scott Taylor (RETIRED) 2004-03-22 14:00:55 UTC]

The aironet driver in 2.6 has been working pretty good for as long as i can
recall. I've mapped out my entire county with kismet and the drivers builtin
to 2.6.4 with this as the kismet source:

source=cisco_wifix,eth1:wifi0,ciscoA

[Comment 13 André Brioso 2004-03-26 19:51:16 UTC]

emerging the february release of kismet (kismet-2004.02.01), using kernel 2.6.3 and configuring the source as "source=cisco_wifix,eth1:wifi0,ciscosource" works for me. 

Thanks Scott, you helped me a lot.. :)

Best Regards,

[Comment 14 Jason Cox (RETIRED) 2004-04-13 23:04:47 UTC]

Closing once again. A solution has been found and agreed upon by all parties.