Direction of wireless networking in Fedora ( was RE: Wireless update to ifup and network-functions )

Jonathan Andrews jon at jonshouse.co.uk
Thu Sep 16 14:03:20 UTC 2004


On Thu, 2004-09-16 at 12:30, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 16, 2004 at 02:33:21AM +0100, Jonathan Andrews wrote:
> > distributions because for reasons purely political (as far as I can
> > tell???) the promisc mode was left on the cutting room floor !!! WHY
> > !!!!
> 
> Promisc mode (on those adapters that support it) is actually rather
> complicated in the wireless world. A lot of the old prism firmware doesn't 
> support it for example. OpenAP has to basically take over the h/w at a much
> lower level to handle that and that involves a native 802.11 stack - which
> oddly enough is the direction that stuff is going

Cool :-)

Monitor mode is optional as far as I understand it. Users will tolerate
a "your hardware wont do that message" more than a "please use xyz
wifi_the_bits_we_left_out.diff and recompile the kernel" ;-)

I understand its a mess at the hardware level and having raw 802.11 will
be cool, but at the moment its getting messy.

I find lots like this  of threads like this
http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/3192
http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/3245
http://www.bastard.net/~kos/wifi/rfmon.html

It would be nice to be able to use cool toys without building new kernel
or modules :-)  Im sure that fedora will be on a lot of laptops, I know
its on mine - and wifi even works :-D

Cheers,
Jon






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