acx100-users

[Acx100-users] a quick success story

[Jim C. B. <ac...@li...>]

I am pretty impressed with the acx100 project. I was able to get a TI
ACX100 card to work with a semi-recent distro and kernel. Most
impressively, it seems to support CCMP (that is, WPA2 or AES).

There's no driver I can find for this card for Windows 7 nd the newest
XP driver I can find can only do WEP! But the acx-mac80211 branch worked
perfectly.

I checked out rev 90ac19873ca14bcf9f6c2c4f3d15feb4ec102ba1 of the
acx-mac80211 branch (at that time, it was HEAD).

This is the kernel that KNOPPIX 6.4.3 uses:

Linux Microknoppix 2.6.36.1 #10 SMP PREEMPT Fri Nov 26 10:33:59 CET 2010
i686 GNU/Linux

It also uses this version of gcc:

gcc (Debian 4.4.5-4) 4.4.5

Card info from lspci -v

05:00.0 Network controller: Texas Instruments ACX 100 22Mbps Wireless
Interface
        Subsystem: Tekram Technology Co.,Ltd. Device 1801
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 11
        I/O ports at 1800 [size=32]
        Memory at 20010000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Memory at 20000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
        Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2
        Kernel driver in use: acx_pci

The card itself is a Gigafast WF721-AEX Txxx, bought many years ago.
(The original company no longer seems to exist.) Perhaps there was
something unique in the hardware of the WF721 that allows it to do
CCMP. I was under the impression that the TI ACX100 could only do
WPA1/TKIP due to hardware limitations (as mentioned in this thread:
http://aptosid.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&p=3583 ,
which I found by a simple Google search).

(A write-up of my first attempt to use this card, back in 2005, is
available here: http://www.ko4bb.com/Linux/Gigafast_WF721-AEX/ )

I also grabbed the firmware from
http://www.kazer.org/acx-firmware-20060207.tar.bz2 (I took this from the
gentoo net-wireless/acx-firmware ebuild). I'm using the acx100_1.10.7.K
firmware. tiacx100     tiacx100r0D  tiacx100r11 installed into
/lib/firmware.

Finally, here's my wpa_supplicant.conf. I start wpa_supplicant manually
with this command line:

wpa_supplicant -ddd -Dwext -iwlan0 -c
/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

And the file itself:

# Minimal /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf.
# Managed by KNOPPIX.
#  Please see
#  /usr/share/doc/wpasupplicant/examples/README.wpa_supplicant.conf.gz
#  for more complete configuration parameters.
#
# Also see the other files in /usr/share/doc/wpasupplicant/examples/ for
#  specific configuration examples.

# path to UNIX socket control interface
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

# Scan for accesspoints, this may be required for hidden ssids
#ap_scan=1
#fast_reauth=1

### Example of basic WPA-PSK secured AP
network={
    #scan_ssid=1
    ssid="myssid"
    #proto=WPA RSN
    #proto=WPA
    #proto=WPA2
    psk="mypsk"
    key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
    #auth_alg=OPEN
    pairwise=CCMP
    group=CCMP
    #pairwise=TKIP
    #group=TKIP
}

It works quite reliably.

----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
Infinite complexity begets infinite beauty.
Infinite precision begets infinite perfection.

Re: [Acx100-users] a quick success story

[Andreas M. <an...@us...>]

Hi,

On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 12:08:01PM -0400, Jim C. Brown wrote:
> 
> I am pretty impressed with the acx100 project. I was able to get a TI
> ACX100 card to work with a semi-recent distro and kernel. Most
> impressively, it seems to support CCMP (that is, WPA2 or AES).

While I have been woefully inactive for a long while,
I have to say many thanks for your report!

> There's no driver I can find for this card for Windows 7 nd the newest
> XP driver I can find can only do WEP! But the acx-mac80211 branch worked
> perfectly.

See, that's just what I recently told certain awfully Windows-affine
surroundings:
"most likely the Linux driver can do a lot more modern things
than the driver that's left available for Windows."
And that nicely confirms it :)

> The card itself is a Gigafast WF721-AEX Txxx, bought many years ago.
> (The original company no longer seems to exist.) Perhaps there was
> something unique in the hardware of the WF721 that allows it to do
> CCMP. I was under the impression that the TI ACX100 could only do
> WPA1/TKIP due to hardware limitations (as mentioned in this thread:
> http://aptosid.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&p=3583 ,
> which I found by a simple Google search).

Not true, I'd think. The card firmware _itself_ is restricted to being
able to handle WEP only, but since the card ought to have fully
transparent framing (as expected by several existing monitor mode
software users!), it should be able to carry any host-CPU-produced protocol.


Thank you for your nice step-by-step report! (I'm sure some guy or
another will have good use for it)

Andreas Mohr

Re: [Acx100-users] a quick success story

[Oliver W. <oli...@ol...>]

Hi Jim,

Thanks a lot for the feedback also from from here! Good to hear that the
driver worked out nicely for you (so as it should ;).

I'm a bit busy with hx4700 works currently. The acx part of it worked
already since quite some time - it's more the general hx side. The acx
work also continues, but it's just a bit shared with the hx currently ;).

Cheers, Oliver

On 08/12/2011 06:08 PM, Jim C. Brown wrote:
> 
> I am pretty impressed with the acx100 project. I was able to get a TI
> ACX100 card to work with a semi-recent distro and kernel. Most
> impressively, it seems to support CCMP (that is, WPA2 or AES).
> 
> There's no driver I can find for this card for Windows 7 nd the newest
> XP driver I can find can only do WEP! But the acx-mac80211 branch worked
> perfectly.
> 
> I checked out rev 90ac19873ca14bcf9f6c2c4f3d15feb4ec102ba1 of the
> acx-mac80211 branch (at that time, it was HEAD).
> 
> 
> (A write-up of my first attempt to use this card, back in 2005, is
> available here: http://www.ko4bb.com/Linux/Gigafast_WF721-AEX/ )
>