Hmmm...I seemed to have stomped out the problem on my Orinocos. It seems that the poorly written lucent drivers did a a number on Netstumbler, and NS was not sufficiently updated to give a stable response (Remember that the latest NS is still a 0.3.30 "beta" release from '02 and even on a stable and well supported card it is unstable at its best). I turned off the automatic configuration option in NS, rebooted the machine, reinit NS and it works fine now. Oh well, I guess you would usually NOT want to run NS for too long. Active snooping for hours can show up in logs of certain APs, and you don't want that.
Anyways, it also seems that certain firmware in Orinoco cards don't like to play nice with NS. 7.52, 6.06 and 8.10 comes in mind. If you run NS you should use 6.16 (Kismet recommended best firmware) or 8.72 (Works fine in Kismet and NS in Win2K). Oh, does anyone know of a way to ascertain whether a cantenna is working as advertised or not? I made a cantenna out of a Campbell's "Chunky Soup" can with an LMR-100 pigtail from FabCorp and a standard 4 post N-connector. So far I cannot tell whether it is working as it should, or that it still needs tuning. What is a nice, scientific way to measure improvement in antenna gain? Also, what do most people use to bond the connector to the can itself? I just used 4 screws. Should they be soldered on or capped with nuts? > I've had similar quirkiness with a couple of Orinoco gold cards. I'd > setup netstumbler to... umm... stumble, but after a few minutes, it'd > detect no signals from any APs around me (and I have a *bunch*). It's as > if I had disconnected the internal antenna from the receiver. More strange > -- I'd reboot the machine, and it still wouldn't detect any signals. I'd > wait a few hours, and it was fine again. This was with two different > cards; no excessive heat or other anomalies were noticed. I never did > figure out exactly what was going on; I ended up putting it aside for a > while, and never got back to it. Very strange stuff. > > Jeff > > On Wed, 18 Feb 2004, Kev wrote: > > > Hey guys. I recently ran into some problems working with a pair of > > Orinoco cards (One gold, one silver) with Netstumbler on a Thinkpad 240 > > running Win2K SP4. It seems that I have lost the ability to detect any > > type of APs, and that despite the fact that I have not update the firmware > ... > > Did anyone run into something similar in your experience? > -- > NYCwireless - http://www.nycwireless.net/ > Un/Subscribe: http://lists.nycwireless.net/mailman/listinfo/nycwireless/ > Archives: http://lists.nycwireless.net/pipermail/nycwireless/ > -- NYCwireless - http://www.nycwireless.net/ Un/Subscribe: http://lists.nycwireless.net/mailman/listinfo/nycwireless/ Archives: http://lists.nycwireless.net/pipermail/nycwireless/
