[nycbug-talk] new to FreeBSD wireless

[Brad Schonhorst]

The front page of news.com.com has an article about FreeBSD 6 and its
support for many wireless devices:
http://news.com.com/

I have been using an iBook since OS X came about but recently decided it
was time to give BSD a try.  I picked up a new TINY Fujitsu P7010 and now
have it running FreeBSD 6.  ( For anyone interested, I documented the
setup of my first BSD laptop here: http://plumblossom.org/p7010d.htm )

Wireless support was obviously a must for the laptop ( hence running
CURRENT to get support for my Atheros card. )  As someone new to BSD
wireless I was wondering if you guys could share with me some of your
favorite tools for wireless use.  I have been somewhat frustrated with the
steps I currently take to discover new wireless access points.

To get wireless access:

1) Run Kismet, find some SSIDs that are open
2) Reboot!  I can't seem to get my card out of Promisc mode otherwise
3) run ifconfig ath0 ssid = ENTERNAME (other commands as needed)
4) run dhclient

Are there any other options, I'd like to avoid rebooting after running
Kismet.  I feel like I must be missing something.  ifconfig destroy won't
work for some reason, I'm guessing its because the entry comes from Kismet
rather than the ifconfig create command.  Any other tools to see what
access points are floating around out there?

I understand the bsd airtools contains dstumbler but it won't work with
the Atheros chipset.  Curious though, do you need to reboot after using
dstumbler?


Thanks all!

Brad