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