Project Evil and WPA
We had a bunch of Belkin wireless bridges leftover when we had a dept moving around and finally got into their own building. I found out that they had a mini-PCI card in them that could be removed and put into a laptop. I saw that it was a Broadcom chipset (Windows drivers only) until I had a couple Windows laptops at work that we wanted to add wireless to. I had a extra one sitting on my desk so I decided to put it in the Dell laptop and see how far I could go with FreeBSD 6.0.
Installation was easy enough since it had two antenna connectors on the card and the laptop and the slot is right behind a panel on the bottom of the laptop. I knew the drivers were hard to find until I found out the Dell 1300 wireless cards had the same chipset. We used those drivers on the Windows laptops and they worked great so I decided that’s what I’ll be using for this too.
Ndisgen makes building a kernel module pretty easy. You need the inf and sys drivers files from Windows and your kernel sources. It built the kernel module and then copied it to /boot/kernel with the other kernel modules. I loaded up the module by hand to make sure it would load fine and then added it and ndis to my loader.conf. A quick reboot to test it all and I see it in my dmesg when it only showed an unidentified PCI network device before. Ifconfig shows ndis0 in my interface list and it appears to be ready to be configured.
I read the man page and found a couple good examples for wpa_supplicant. This seems to be fairly straight forward so I loaded the kernel module, created a config file and fired it up. Everything seemed to work so I ran a dhclient on ndis0 and it immediately picks up an address. I was a bit suprised that it went so smoothly but it’s been working great for the last couple days. One of the limitations to using NDIS wrappers is that you can’t use monitor mode with the cards so wireless sniffing is out. I have an Atheros and a Orinoco card that I can use for that and besides, the Powerbook and KisMac do a better job at that anyway.