Just for comments:
This poor guy's been fighting this for awhile. My
instinct is that
hardware is the core of his issue. Windows specific
hardware has always
been a nightmare for Linux. Any comments or ideas??
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [social] Wireless Networking in Linux -
Redux
Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2005 11:57:44 -0500
From: Rod Engelsman
Reply-To: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
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.
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