ATH Card not recognized as WLAN interface

[Roman]

I am running OPNsense 16.1-i386 on an Alix with two ATH cards, a Wistron DCMA81, and a Compex WLM200NX. However, OPNsense does not recognize the DCMA81 card as a WLAN interface (i.e., it does not allow me to enter the WLAN-specific information for the interface), and also the WLM200NX card it seemed to recognize as a WLAN interface only after cloning it once (although I deleted the clone again, and it still shows up as a WLAN interface, which is good, rebooting it in-between might also have helped). But nothing I tried has made it recognize the DCMA81 as a WLAN interface. So my question is, whether there is anything I can do to have it recognize the DCMA81 card also as a WLAN interface?

Somewhat related, it also seems that if I want to use a card as an access point (i.e., in hostap mode), I need to add the additional interface pointing to ath?_wlan0. The ath? interface itself (if it is recognized as a WLAN interface), only allows infrastructure (BSS) mode. Is that as intended?

Please let me know if you need any additional information on my setup.

[franco]

Hi Roman,

ath(4) is not the best card/driver combination under FreeBSD 10. Most of the updates are locked away in what is 11-CURRENT on our way to FreeBSD 11.0. However, Shawn from the HardenedBSD project offers 11-CURRENT builds for OPNsense. They are experimental, but would make your cards work better for sure.

https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=2117.0

The other option would be to buy other cheap USB wifi adapters and go with them in the meantime. Some have also suggested to rather use external APs, depending on your requirements and contraints.


Cheers,
Franco

[Roman]

Hi Franco,

Thanks for the reply. I might try the experimental build at some point, but currently I think it was mentioned that WiFi doesn't work yet. But in any case, I am not using the device for anything critical right now, and at least one card seems to be working, so I'll just keep an eye on the progress of both the experimental build and OPNsense. I assume OPNsense will eventually move to FreeBSD 11 too?

Thanks and best regards,

Roman

[franco]

Hi Roman,

Yes, we will keep migrating to keep up with official FreeBSD releases. 10.3 looks like a good stepping stone on our way to 11, but we haven't decided what we're going to do for 16.7. We'll publish a roadmap in two weeks and it's going to be in there.

By the time 16.7 is out I have good faith that the HardenedBSD/OPNsense combo runs smoothly on 11, whether it's already officially released or not. You can read about the FreeBSD schedules here:

https://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.3R/schedule.html
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.0R/schedule.html


Cheers,
Franco