Gentlemen, Comrades, Friends, and Associates:
I have a statement to make that you will all probably find
provocative -- perhaps even offensive -- but I believe it is true
nonetheless.
"At the current state of the art, the Linux operating system is a
security hazard when employed on computers communicating via wireless
networks."
Which is to say, unless you are a) very lucky or very careful in
selecting hardware, b) reasonably proficient with the command line and
configuration scripts, and c) willing to do a BUNCH of homework and
experimentation, setting up a secure wireless network is probably beyond
your capabilities and may be entirely impossible.
We all know that an unsecured network is... well, insecure, duh. And WEP
is easily broken with modern hardware and freely available GNU/Linux
hacker tools. The only decent wireless security is some flavor of WPA,
preferably WPA-RADIUS with 802.1x authentication. This provides 256-bit
encryption with rotating keys and centralized challenge-response
authentication. For home users WPA-PSK (which utilizes pre-set keys for
authentication, rather than a central server) is reasonably secure.
I have three computers in the house -- four if you count this dual-boot
box as two, which it is in a very real sense, since what is a computer
without an OS? A Dell laptop that came with a wireless card, a Toshiba
laptop that I stuck a Linksys card into, and this box with a D-Link
wireless pci card. The Dell runs XP and the Toshiba runs FC4. The dual
boot box runs both.
Frankly, it was enough of a trick just to get the wireless cards working
at all under Linux. Fortunately, the D-Link card has an Atheros chipset
so it will work with mad-wifi. I "only" had to install a custom kernel
and screw around for half a day to get WEP to work.
The Toshiba required a distro with ndiswrapper to use the Windows
drivers since there are no Linux drivers for that card. First I tried
Ark Linux. That would only get a little way through the install before
it would eject the cdrom and reboot for no apparent reason -- it's now a
shiny coaster. Then I tried Mepis. I got it to actually install the
drivers and it worked unsecured, but for some odd reason every time I
would log into KDE it would launch three -- not 1, not 2, but 3 --
instances of KWiFiManager that would sit there and blink and tell me it
couldn't connect, even though I could close them out and use Firefox
just fine. Weird.
So I got tired of trying to figure out where Mepis keeps the config
files -- what little I know of Linux is Redhat/Fedora -- and then the
stupid thing totally locked up on me, for about the 5th time --
requiring a power-off reboot. Got out my FC4 discs and installed
something I halfway understand. Then I had to sneakernet a few packages
over to it and got the wireless working -- unsecured. Let it do about
198 updates -- no exaggeration -- and then installed ndiswrapper and
wpa_supplicant from ATRPMs. I have spent probably a week and a half now
Googling, asking around on newsgroups, and studying the sample config
files, etc. trying to get this all to work together.
And that's where I stand. I'm not an expert at Linux, but I'm also not
stupid, and I actually DO know a thing or two about networking. This is
just too hard, too convoluted, too poorly documented, and consists of
entirely too many moving parts. I have to face the reality that this
particular combination of hardware, software, and protocols simply may
not be capable of functioning.
Wireless networking is not particularly new. It's not an odd corner of
computing that one should maybe expect to have trouble with. How many
people out there have laptops that they would like to connect wirelessly
to the Internet? More and more every day. The Linux community HAS to get
a better handle on this.
It baffles me why some of the major distributions don't tackle this head
on.
Rod
BTW, it takes all of about 10 minutes, tops, to set up a secure wireless
network with "that other" OS.
