OpenBSD Journal

[Ask OBSDJ] OpenBSD 3.0 as a wireless access point

Contributed by Dengue on from the 802.11b dept.

chris writes : "I am currently attempting to use OpenBSD 3.0 snapshot as a wireless access point / dhcp server / gateway and was just looking for any help or comments from other people who may have done the same thing. I am using the Orinoco silver with pci adapter (wi0 device). Just looking for a discussion of wireless and OpenBSD 2.x/3.0"

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward () on

    hmmm, I've never used wireless yet and barely know how it works, personally. Main reason is cause I don't have the $ to buy an access point along with the adapters. Out of curiosity, from what you're saying, does this mean somehow (however to do it, as your question seems to state) that we can avoid buying one of those hardware based access points (regardless of OS - the things that look like a hub) to serve as one? I'd like to see any comments on this as well, and maybe how it works, or how I can go about this in the cheapest way. Tired of running 100ft Cat5 cables down two floors, into my living room from my server room.

  2. By Bob () on

    I bought an ELSA wireless card and PCMCIA to PCI adaptater. This is supposed to be the same chipset as an Onorico card.

    I'd like to say that not only did it work flawlessly on OpenBSD 2.9, but it is the _only_ operating system with which the card worked. I tried Win2K with the vendors drivers, Linux, NetBSD and FreeBSD, and there would always be timeout problems.

    To solve the WEP insecurity, I installed vtun
    (http://vtun.sourceforge.net). I did that mostly because I had no time to set up IPsec.

    My OpenBSD-access point listens on 192.168.3.1, and ipf denies any traffic going through this interface and going to any other place. Then I wrote a script for my laptop (wilan-start) which starts vtund.
    I configured vtund so that the default route is actually the tunnel endpoint, so that every traffic goes through the tunnel. I never use 192.168.3.x directly, and you should not do so.


    In the whole, OpenBSD acts as an excellent wireless access point, and I'm really happy with it.

  3. By chris () chris@makenode.com on mailto:chris@makenode.com

    wow.. didn't expect this much interest. I too had no idea you didn't need a 300$US access point, but once I got wind of that .. went out and bought a orinoco silver / with pci adapter. I know have an openbsd 3.0 gateway / pf firewall / cable modem router. I think when I have it all ironed out I will do a write up so others don't have to do all the google searching that i did. thanx again.

    ::chris::

  4. By Anonymous Coward () on

    I understand that it is entirely possible to have nics talk to each other without an access point using the 'ad-hoc' mode, but is it possible to have one act as an access point and the others talking to it via ibss? Every peice of documentation that I've read on the subject either says that it isn't or incorrectly labels the ad-hoc mode as an access point.

  5. By marc () on http://www.wireless-fr.org

    check in french http://www.wireless-fr.org/aide.htm or http://www.wireless-fr.org/howto-ap-bsd/howto-ap-bsd.html there is some cheap AP: check orinoco rg1100 at outpost.com =169$ for configuring on obsd you have to use the command wicontrol (look at man page ) cheers

  6. By Marc () marcm@lectroid.net on mailto:marcm@lectroid.net

    I've set up my OpenBSD gateway to handle IPSec traffic over a Lucent wireless card and I have IPF blocking all non esp traffic and it works well.

    I even have Win2k talking to the mix as well as PGPNet.

    Once the clients are configured to only talk to IPSec hosts this effectivly turns the gateway into an "Access Point" even though it's still just in ad-hoc mode.

  7. By Aasmund () aasmund@godal.com on http://envisity.com

    and with any base station being (802.11) offcourse. And especially an apple with an airport with some of the pc-based systems.

  8. By Sam Barranco () barrancs@colorado.edu on mailto:barrancs@colorado.edu

    I'm using avaya's silver cards and a vadem isa pcmcia bridge with OpenBSD 2.9 without any problems. in fact i had to do some editing to pccard.conf in FreeBSD to get it to work, whereas it was automatically detected and configured with OpenBSD's default install.

  9. By sean () novitiate@perlmonk.org on mailto:novitiate@perlmonk.org

    Is there anyway to use an OBSD box as a _bridge_
    and not a router ?

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