Not a rant, but ... wireless?

[Speedy]

I wanted to add wireless access point capability to my router. It has a low power Atom board, no free PCI slots, so I need a USB device. Of course, as a long time FOSS user I started by looking at hardware compatibility list. Figured out Atheros is a safe bet, double checked the chipset, purchased one from Newegg. But, on arrival ... I learned the manufacturer changed the chipset to an unsupported AR9271. The only consolation is it works in Linux.
So I got more serious, today morning I spent over an hour studying available devices - and ended up with nothing. Obviously I want something that has better than a tiny built-in antenna and can be used as an AP. There is no shortage of such adapters, just none of them works in FreeBSD. Most of them work in Linux and OpenBSD.

Question. Can some good soul tell me which adapter with good range (bigger antenna) to get?

 

[wblock@]

A WRT54G in bridge mode is very hard to beat, especially with replacement firmware.

If you're determined to run it on FreeBSD, look at https://wiki.freebsd.org/dev/ath_hal(4)/HardwareSupport. There are PCI and PCIE adapter cards that can take the mini version of the wireless card, and have connectors for external antennas.

 

[Speedy]

Thanks for reply. WRT54G in bridge mode - can it be used as a 4-port switch for wired connections? My switches are getting full, that was why I was considering a USB device as a primary choice.

 

[wblock@]

Thanks for reply. WRT54G in bridge mode - can it be used as a 4-port switch for wired connections? My switches are getting full, that was why I was considering a USB device as a primary choice.

Yes. I had not tried it for that before, always just used it as an access point. Tried just now, works fine.

 

[Speedy]

Thanks again. Will get one.

 

[wblock@]

If you're buying a genuine WRT54G, check the revision. Some can't use replacement firmware. http://www.dd-wrt.com/ has a list.

The guys on the freebsd-wireless mailing list have actually booted FreeBSD natively on the TP-Link TL-WR1043ND (I think that's the right model number), and it's gigabit also.

 

[Speedy]

Purchased a refurbished one from eBay, $29.99 shipped. Comes with DD-WRT preloaded. I'm no fan of wireless, really. Just my old Motorola AP is not up to task (it never had a good range).

 

[kpedersen]

When I need new WIFI card, I just walk into Maplin and buy 5. Test them out then take them all back and stick to wired because none of them worked...

Hehe, on a perhaps more useful note I bought an Edimax EW-7711UAn and it seems to work great on 9.0-RELEASE and 8.3-RELEASE. It uses the if_run driver which you can see in the hardware notes... http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.1R/hardware.html.

So whilst there is still a little luck involved (i.e in case the hardware manufacturers change chip, things are getting much better.

Ironically the box said that it officially supported Linux 2.6 kernels and above, yet when I tried it on RHEL6, it wasn't recognized. So at least if FreeBSD says it supports it, you don't have to worry about different distributions etc...

 

[drhowarddrfine]

Just to add in. The WRT54G worked for me, too, when I was using one.