Wireless router

quantum0726 · n00b Joined: 25 Mar 2005 Posts: 26 Location: Milwaukee, WI

Hi,
I'm trying to setup a box to be a wireless extender. I have a wireless network, but it's too weak to reach throughout the entire building. I have a box with two PCI wireless cards. I've built a router before, so I'm guessing I could just set this up like that but with wlan0 and wlan1 instead of eth0 and eth1. So far I have the box up and running and iwconfig shows both cards. I have ndiswrapper installed and wireless-tools. I also installed wpa_supplicant, though I think I'll only need WEP encryption. The part where I'm stuck now is trying to figure out how to scan current wireless networks to see what my card can see and then to have one card create a network, preferably encrypted. Any ideas how to do this? I've seen a number of how-tos, but nothing that actually seemed to help. I'm not too familiar with wireless as I've mostly used wired networks before. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks much!
_________________
--Jayson

When Microsoft asks you, "Where do you want to go today?", tell them "*nix!"

JoKo · Posted: Fri Aug 12, 2005 9:52 pm Post subject:

You could use kismet to scan for wireless networks...

As for encryption, I wouldn't recommend you to use WEP since it can be easily broken.

Also, if you are trying to make your box an access point, wpa_supplicant is the client part; you actually need hostapd... But that's only for WPA, not WEP.

ph03n1x · l33t Joined: 06 Feb 2003 Posts: 756

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-369287.html

quantum0726 · n00b Joined: 25 Mar 2005 Posts: 26 Location: Milwaukee, WI

Thanks for the hints. They got me well on my way to getting it set up. I am now playing with kismet on one of my other computers (it really is a powerful app!), though I still can't get it to load with my Netgear card in the "router".

Unfortunately I have a feeling this project is going to die soon as I've found out that the ndiswrapper for my card doesn't support master mode. Every how-to I've seen recommends getting an orinoco or prism card. While a nice toy to have (those card really have good sending and receiving power and are extremely Linux compatible), they are almost as expensive as a wireless extender, which would serve about the same purpose for me.

Though, if anyone has any ideas how to get master mode to work, please let me know. Thanks!
_________________
--Jayson

When Microsoft asks you, "Where do you want to go today?", tell them "*nix!"