Solved Help setting up WiFi Cards - Unsupported hardware

Manuel Solis

Manuel Solis

Dear FreeBSD Support forum,

I didn't want to ask for help about this topic as there is No Supported Hardware involved, but I will appreciate some help, the scenario is like this:

Have a Dell Precision T7400 with FreeBSD RELEASE 11 installed and I did try to setting up a few wireless USB cards, so I looked at the handbook and in the forum and did try it with no success. At that moment I had 2 options: COM-843 (urtwn0, vendor 0x0bda, MAC/BB RTL8192CU, RF 6052 2T2R) and TL-WN422G v2 (atheros, Thread 11638)

So it didn't work, so I bought another two: RALINK PCI (RT3060 Wireless 802.11n 1T/1R) and DWA-131 (Wireless N Nano USB Adapter Realtek) unfortunately for me I discovered too late that all the four options are in the black list (unsupported hardware).

I did try to set up in the kernel the drivers by compiling it and by using /boot/loader.conf
and I did try to use the ndisgen(8) command with the WinXP drivers but I did not have success.

The easy way is to give up but, as I know I am not a specialist. I would appreciate if you could give me some advice :S

Thank you so much in advance.
 
COM-843 should work, although from my experience is not really reliable, provided that you set:
legal.realtek.license_ack=1 in /boot/loader.conf as described in urtwn(4).

DWA-131 same as above, use the same urtwn driver.

For urtwn based devices, sometimes help unplug/replug the dongle.

Don't know the other two.
 
ASX said:
COM-843 should work, although from my experience is not really reliable, provided that you set:
legal.realtek.license_ack=1 in /boot/loader.conf as described in urtwn(4).

DWA-131 same as above, use the same urtwn driver.

For urtwn based devices, sometimes help unplug/replug the dongle.

Don't know the other two.
Click to expand...

Thank you for answering

The /boot/loader.conf is actually like that:
Code: 
#/boot/loader.conf
kern.geom.label.disk_ident.enable="0"
kern.geom.label.gptid.enable="0"
zfs_load="YES"
# Driver RAL for Ralink wireless PCI card - not working as the RT3060 is unsupported
if_ral_load="YES"
#Realtek driver
if_urtwn_load="YES"
legal.realtek.license_ack=1

But if i excecute
Code: 
ifconfig
it does not show any of them, just the lo0: loopback device.

Am i doing anything wrong?
 
Manuel Solis said:
it does not show any of them, just the lo0: loopback device.
Click to expand...
On FreeBSD 11.0 WiFi interfaces will not show up directly in ifconfig anymore. You first have to create a wlan0 device with e.g. ifconfig wlan0 create wlandev urtwn0. You can check dmesg or sysctl net.wlan.devices to see if the drivers attached to your devices.
 
tobik said:
On FreeBSD 11.0 WiFi interfaces will not show up directly in ifconfig anymore. You first have to create a wlan0 device with e.g. ifconfig wlan0 create wlandev urtwn0. You can check dmesg or sysctl net.wlan.devices to see if the drivers attached to your devices.
Click to expand...

Thank you for your answer, i did try that last Friday without success, let me do it again this noon and collect more info so i could explain better what is going on that server,

Right now, it continue to detect the device in on dmesg but it not show it on sysctl net.wlan.devices or ifconfig

Thank you again and i will post the results as soon i can try it again.
 
Atsuri said:
What is also missing is the setting for the interfaces in /etc/rc.conf:
Code: 
wlans_urtwn0="wlan0"
ifconfig_wlan0="WPA SYNCDHCP"
from https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/network-wireless.html. ifconfig needs to know that it's supposed to manage a specific interface and that the interface is to be handled by dhclient (for DHCP leasing), too.
Click to expand...

Thank you all for your information, unfortunately have not make it work so far,

The closest i reached was with the COM-843 (urtwn0, vendor 0x0bda, MAC/BB RTL8192CU, RF 6052 2T2R) adapter, nevertheless it did the following:
1- acknowledge that it exist in urtwn0 as wlan0
2- indeed enable the adapter showing urtwn0: enabling 11n
3- but it seems strange to me that it also says: wlan0: Ethernet addess: ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
4- so after configuring /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf and excecuting service netif restart
it started to show just messages like:
Code: 
<date> <hostname> dhclient[2432]: send_packet: No buffer space available
<date> <hostname>last message repeated 4 times
<date> <hostname> dhclient[2432]: send_packet: Network is down
<date> <hostname> dhclient[2432]: send_packet: No buffer space available
...
and so on until i unplug the device.

After a while i decided to give a chance to OpenBSD 6.0 to test the adapters again:
TL-WN422G v2 (atheros, Thread 11638) worked fine with the firmware athn-firmware-1.1p1.tgz,
DWA-131 (Wireless N Nano USB Adapter Realtek) did not work at all, and
the COM-843 worked! with the firmware urtwn-firmware-1.2.tgz.

Maybe i am mising something so i could make it work in my FreeBSD RELEASE 11, question is: is there any way that FreeBSD takes the athn firmware file from OpenBSD as it does with
Code: 
# ndisgen /path/to/W32DRIVER.INF /path/to/W32DRIVER.SYS
with windows drivers??

Thank you in advance.
 
Here are two very detailed threads on using a RealTek RTL8192CU Wi-Fi Nano USB device dongle, similar to the COM-843
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/59289/#post-340046 RTL8192CU Wi-Fi setup
http://ghostbsd.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=526&sid=8d9d98ed373726dd1014aafa035106b7 RTL8192CU Wi-Fi Setup
http://ghostbsd.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=16&sid=8d9d98ed373726dd1014aafa035106b7 How Do I tell what Driver I need?

Note that in FreeBSD 12.0 Current revision 307529, the driver was rewritten where the USB & PCI Realtek Devices where incorporated into one driver rtwn. For RTL8192CU Load kernel modules: if_rtwn.ko if_rtwn_usb.ko For RTL8188CE Load kernel module:
if_rtwn.ko if_rtwn_pci.ko



# /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf example file for an Open Network connection to Wireless SSID name "innflux"
Code: 
network={
   ssid="innflux"
   key_mgmt=NONE
}


# /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf example file for an WPA-PSK Network connection to Wireless SSID name "NETGEAR59" with pass-key "my_passkey_892"

Code: 
network={
   #: my NetGear box
   ssid="NETGEAR59"
   key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
   psk="my_passkey_892"
}

After editing the /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file did you manually issue the WPA_Supplicant command?
Code: 
wpa_supplicant -B -i wlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
killall dhclient
dhclient wlan0



The Atheros Chips should have good support under FreeBSD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_wireless_drivers
https://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/CURRENT/hardware/support.html
 
I'm actually surprised that there are problems with an iteration of the RealTek RTL8192CU adapter. I'm using it on my 11-STABLE laptop as part of a TP-LINK WN823N USB dongle. In FreeBSD 10.x-RELEASE I had to explicitly load the firmware via /boot/loader.conf, though since some time it's no longer needed :). Another viable option is TP-LINK WN725N with RealTek RTL8188EU. On GNU/Linux both of those suck due to poorly written drivers. On FreeBSD they rock! :D
 
https://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/CURRENT/hardware/support.html To my knowledge, and someone correct me if I am wrong, but you really want a card that uses the Ath driver. That is the best wireless driver written for fbsd. Trust me, I am not trying to be pedantic when I say this. But you really should consider a wired setup. When I got fed up with the run driver, my ISP company was able to come in and give me a coaxial connection to a desktop in another room besides the one I have my modem/router in. I went from 14 mbps on a good day to over 85. This may not be possible with your company/living situation. But its a thought.
 
Thank you all for writing, i really appreciate that.

Gdan said:
Trust me, I am not trying to be pedantic when I say this. But you really should consider a wired setup. When I got fed up with the run driver, my ISP company was able to come in and give me a coaxial connection to a desktop in another room besides the one I have my modem/router in. I went from 14 mbps on a good day to over 85. This may not be possible with your company/living situation. But its a thought.
Click to expand...
It is a great advice indeed, and for production environment i would certainly wire it, my "big" deal is that i actually am working just fine in my freeBSD Laptop (wifi included), but as far as i try i cannot make these wifi usb cards work so i could use them to support and test a server.
Gdan said:
https://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/CURRENT/hardware/support.html To my knowledge, and someone correct me if I am wrong, but you really want a card that uses the Ath driver. That is the best wireless driver written for fbsd.
Click to expand...
i should procede as you suggest and buy a couple of Ath devices :)

Atsuri said:
I'm actually surprised that there are problems with an iteration of the RealTek RTL8192CU adapter. I'm using it on my 11-STABLE laptop as part of a TP-LINK WN823N USB dongle. In FreeBSD 10.x-RELEASE I had to explicitly load the firmware via /boot/loader.conf, though since some time it's no longer needed :). Another viable option is TP-LINK WN725N with RealTek RTL8188EU. On GNU/Linux both of those suck due to poorly written drivers. On FreeBSD they rock! :D
Click to expand...
You are right, it is really strange, even the mac address detected by that is ff:ff:ff:ff...
maybe a HW error (Even do OpenBSD and Linux recognized it)

tingo said:
FWIW, all that is usually required in a "network" section in wpa_supplicant.conf is correct ssid and psk settings for the wireless network in question.
Click to expand...
Thank you!! maybe it is something else since i configured it in the same way as in my freeBSD laptop :S

wb7odyfred said:
Here are two very detailed threads on using a RealTek RTL8192CU Wi-Fi Nano USB device dongle, similar to the COM-843
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/59289/#post-340046 RTL8192CU Wi-Fi setup
http://ghostbsd.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=526&sid=8d9d98ed373726dd1014aafa035106b7 RTL8192CU Wi-Fi Setup
http://ghostbsd.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=16&sid=8d9d98ed373726dd1014aafa035106b7 How Do I tell what Driver I need?
....
Click to expand...
All those threats are great, i indeed followed them before posting this issue, but you are pointing something interesting, maybe i should try FreeBSD 12 CURRENT and see how it goes.


Again, Thank you all for your answers, i really appreciate the support,

I should close the threat now,

Here are my conclusions:
1- First of all, It was my fault, pointing a great advice from the openBSD FAQ that wisely says:
  • Let the application choose the hardware: It is usually better to make an adjustment to the hardware you were planning on using rather than compromising on your application design because you have something you really wanted to use. https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq1.html#Platforms
2- So that was my bad by buying without double checking the HW Support, definitely all those cards are not supported since they are not explicitly mentioned or are clearly identified as not supported. Period to that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_wireless_drivers
https://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/CURRENT/hardware/support.html

3- The "Special" case of the COM843 (RTL8192CU) maybe it is a HW Error since there is not mac address (well, it is, but a wrong one ff:ff:ff:ff...), since its configured from a local brand, wisely will quote again the openBSD FAQ:
  • Avoid cheap network adapters: OpenBSD supports a plethora of cheap network adapters. These adapters work great in home systems and low or moderate throughput business and research environments. If you need high throughput and low impact on your server, you are better off buying a quality network adapter.https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq1.html#Platforms
4- I am really grateful for your support, all your post forced me to try harder and to learn more and more, i did test all your suggestions in four different boxes: Dell Precission T7400, Dell Precission 690, an Alaska oldy and a gigabyte mini box.
I confirmed that your suggestions worked fine in my laptop but not with the dongles, instead i am more confident now and got experience. (too bad that didn't work at all)

5- For homework i will try with FreeBSD 12 CURRENT and see how it goes.

Ps.- I am sorry if i quote the openBSD FAQ instead the FreeBSD Handbook, i use both SO´s as a BSD fan (FreeBSD for versatility, ports and ZFS, OpenBSD for security, man pages and fun) and i have read them all too (and buyed a couple of books), i just wanted to make the point.
 
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