It has a detachable aerial (unlike the WGR614), and I want to attach a slightly more powerful external one instead; it shouldn't be that difficult to cover the entire center of West Berlin, should it? We shall see. Yes, until then at the latest I will protect my LAN from my WLAN with yet another firewall, just as the WLAN gurus suggest.

...

Of course, I had no problem getting this card to run under WinXP and Win2000 and to let it communicate with their WGR614.

The crucial question is actually, how to get it running under SuSE Linux.

This is what I got reported into syslog, when I first inserted it:

I then read, I should launch a cardctl ident in order to display the card identification strings.

The chipset of the card was mentioned on the lwlan-devel mailing list:

I didn't even attempt to use this device under WinXP -- I simply had / have no need to.

It was pretty clear, that the card would run under SuSE-Linux 8.2 with their patched 2.4.20 Linux kernel and the Linux Kernel Card Services 3.1.22.

It still took me a while, to get everything as nice, as I want it.

This article supplied by SuSE helped me a lot: Wireless LANs with SuSE Linux.

SuSE Linux employs the orinoco module for the PrismII chipset, and avoids WLAN-NG. They attempted to remove all cards using the PrismII from the WLAN-NG system, but apparently they didn't consider Netgear's MA401, so I had to comment out that card myself in /etc/pcmcia/wlan-ng.conf. They also describe, you yourself would have to prepare an entry in /etc/pcmcia/config^[2]. After this amendment everything is fine with the basic configuration.

Because when I initially started with WLAN and the Netgear stuff for it, I assumed I would only work with 802.11g equipment for the time being, but as I now would have to integrate a "just 802.11b" NIC, I had to change one setting for my WGR614 in the “Wireless Settings” section: Instead of just “g” I set the Mode to “g and b”.

And as setting up an environment with basic settings (and later progressing to the more advanced levels) makes life much easier than diving into a complicated set-up from the very beginning, I changed my Encryption Strengh to “Disable” and the Authentication Type to “Automatic”.

Finally I changed the Authentication Type back to “Shared Key”, which corresponds to a “iwconfig eth0 key restricted” on the Linux side; actually Open System (resp. open on the Linux side) means, the interface accepts non-encrypted packets only, whereas Shared Key (resp. restricted on the Linux side) means, the interface discards non-encrypted packets.

And I also changed the Encryption Strength back to “128bit”; I assume, on the Linux side they seek to use exactly that encryption strengh, that works fine with the access point or whatever, therefore there is no settings variable for that.

Only from looking at the shell script /etc/sysconfig/network/scripts/ifup-wireless I found, that the proper way to set the authentication type to restricted is to set WIRELESS_IWCONFIG_OPTIONS="key restricted" in /etc/sysconfig/network/wireless.

Otherwise you just have to set WIRELESS_ESSID and WIRELESS_KEY^[3] as needed, and set WIRELESS_MODE='Managed', corresponding to Network Mode Infrastructure.

Through /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth-pcmcia and /etc/sysconfig/network/wireless you can't define an entire set of WEP keys and let one of them be the active one. Therefore I wrote my script /etc/sysconfig/network/JH_set_keys.sh, that defines every single WEP key (1 through 4) of a set and makes one of them the active one:

iwconfig eth0 key 'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa' '[1]'
iwconfig eth0 key 'bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb' '[2]'
iwconfig eth0 key 'cccccccccccccccccccccccccc' '[3]'
iwconfig eth0 key 'dddddddddddddddddddddddddd' '[4]'

iwconfig eth0 key '[2]'

Actually I got the impression, that this software finds the matching key itself und does not need explicit setting.

This card talks WLAN, GPRS, and HSCSD.

Nokia provides the Linux community with working drivers, but actually they only support Redhat Linux. There are ways to get it functional under SuSE Linux and Debian Linux as well. And I want to describe, what I did for SuSE Linux 8.2.

		    OS_RELEASE=2.4.20-4GB
		    ROOTDIR=
		  

... (to be done) ...

... (to be done) ...

		    nokia_ctl gsm enable_gsm
		    nokia_ctl gsm enableGSMradio # asks for the PIN code of the SIM card
		  

[Dialer operator_t_mobile]
        Init4 = AT+CGDCONT=,,"internet.t-d1.de"
        Phone = *99#
        Username = Ihr_Name
        password = t-d1
		    

The SuSE article on “Wireless LANs with SuSE Linux” mentioned above pointed me to Airsnort, a set of patches to standard Linux software and some extra software, allowing NIC-s based on the PrismII chipset to work in a monitor mode, basically allowing to NIC to capture the WLAN network traffic for concurrent sniffing. The sofware also helps cracking the WEP keys. This sounds rather frightening. In their FAQ they have an item “About how long would it take to get the password for a network with AirSnort?”, that I think is worth reading and digesting.

AirSnort requires approximately 100M-1GB of data to be gathered. Once enough packets have been gathered, AirSnort can guess the encryption password in under a second.

URL-s:

My humble statement on security in WLAN-s: