A new cool wireless device
 

The RealTek 8180L chipset, is cooler then pre-sliced cheese.

http://www.realtek.com.tw/products/p...odelid=2002111

This is the first wireless device I've ever seen on the market with drivers developed by the manufacturer, and not only do they pay attention to the wireless extensions API of the Linux Kernel, they work!

I ran accross this card about 2 days ago, got to play with it for about an hour and a half, and got it to do all sorts of funky things. It takes all of its settings through funky iwpriv commands, but that's alright, it works brilliantly, and I compiled the driver with 3 tiny changes to the Makefile in about 20 seconds.

AND, this thing is cheap, much cheaper than the Lucent Silver (still the king card to get), and the prism2's, and its a cardbus card so you don't have to worry about hacking support into cardmgr by monkeying with /etc/pcmcia/config. You just insmod the module!

Hah! Take that Texas Instruments, take that Broadcom, you friggin g weenies!

Cheers,

Finegan

Where can I buy this card? No info on RealTek's page and google searches came up blank.

I can't remember the brand name on the one I got to play with, it had a picture of a snake on it... :)

One of the side parts of my job is to get the student's laptops to talk to the wireless LAN here, I completely failed to get this thing working under XP with my dwindling windows skills, but then traded him my Lucent Silver for a few hours so I could play with it under Linux. He claimed to have bought it off of pricewatch for what he claimed was, "dirt cheap".

Its only been out a few weeks though, so just give it time to find one on the market, or you can use any number of the currently working ones out there, check the other sticky in this forum for a list.

Cheers,

Finegan

wireless products become more and more

RealTek 8180L Wireless 802.11b card
 

Hey Fin,

I bought that card off pricewatch too. It was under $30.....The instructions to compile were easy enough but I was a bit confuesd as I am new too the linux wireless configurations..........I got the damn thing to work :cool: cause I am broke and can't afford any other card. but this one works well please post some commands for this card.

WEP 128???
 

You will have to forgive me if I seem ignorant, I am new to Linux. I'm curious about the security of RTL8180L. My understanding of WEB 128 is that it sucks. I have little experience with wireless but "a friend" that has grown up using Linux says that a wireless network is confined to 128 bit encrption unless using some sort of Linux i.e., Unix. You've helped me just recently with an NVIDIA problem and your explanation was on the mark. With that, is someone confined to encryption at the hardware level or software level? I'm guessing that you can encrypt at both using both.
I think what I'm saying is that Windows only supports up to 128bit maybe 256bit software where as Linux can get upto 2048bit software; but is hardware stuck at 128bit? If so, when is this going to change? If not, what hardware supports higher?

Forgive me I'll ramble on..and on...and on...

Thanks

The bit level of the encryption in WEP doesn't mean much, its also in the 802.11 spec, its the same accross the board for windows, Linux, the BSDs... anything you can pop a wireless card into.

Another fallacy is that WEP is worthless, and I bought into that FUD for a while too. Then I got curious and bored and compiled Wepcrack and Airsnort and the patched libpcap and set about attacking my own wireless LAN. I was using a P3 500 to passively sniff packets while a forced transfer at 1MB/sec passed between the AP and the one client on the network. It was a constantly repeated download of kernel source, so there was a veritible ton of traffic in the air for airsnort to examine for weak packets. This was also on 64-bit WEP, the weaker of the two in-spec encryption levels.

It took 20 hours for the P3 to sniff the key.

You gotta realize that I recreated the traffic of about a week of 1 client surfing. Apparently it works much faster on wlans with a lot more clients, maybe exponentially, but I'm not going to snarfle through anyone elses wlan, even though its a passive attack, that's just rude. This was also using ad-hoc mode, which apparently reduces traffic quite a bit. Now that I have a machine running as master I should try it again. Maybe borrow another card and see if two clients hammering bandwidth makes the key easier to grab.

Still, that's a lot more robust security then most, it takes effort to get that many packets.

The other options... VPNs, which work under any number of OSes, also a cute project from www.blackalchemy.to called FakeAP that just creates a flood of false access points, like 50000.

Wireless under Linux is functional, and really much easier to secure, but not due to wireless support, just due to Linux's massive configurability over say... a set-top wireless router.

Cheers,

Finegan

Re: RealTek 8180L Wireless 802.11b card
 

There are a pair of threads going on about this one now, this one has the most number of answers:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...5&pagenumber=5

Cheers,

Finegan

WEP
 

Again, thanks for the explanation.