[nflug] [Fwd: [social] Wireless Networking in Linux - Redux]

[Greg Neumann]

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: 	social at openoffice.org
To: 	social at openoffice.org



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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