[Madwifi-devel] AR5008/AR5418 re-branding

[D. W. <in...@da...>]

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Hi list,
	I've got an issue with some wireless adapters I purchased, the short  
of it is, I purchased 180 PCIe wifi cards (not miniPCIe) from the US  
military, drivers are not available publicly, these cards have custom  
ID's, they say that the card is a re-ID from "168c,0024 - 103c,2a5f"  
to "3f21,0001 - 168c, 3f21", using setpci I couldn't get the card to  
work so I took the madwifi source, adjusted the ID's to match on the  
obscure ID's and have confirmed that the cards do work.  Two of the  
older dated cards have the following ID's "168c,0024 - 11ad,1499" and  
three of the newer cards have the "168c,0024 - 103c,2a5f" (these were  
still sealed so are considered unmodified) which pretty much worked  
out of the box.

I have confirmed that the proper ID's when provided to the US  
military were "168c,0024 - 103c,2a5f" from a discussion of with one  
of the tech's in their IT department however they would not provide  
the tool they used for security reasons or re-brand the cards since  
their task/concern was disposal in favor of newer technology that is  
satellite communication based.

ath_info doesn't allow me to modify the ID's or even look at the  
data, it responds with "Unable to read EEPROM Magic value!".

I took a look at the AR5005EG debrand.c source, I was wondering if  
someone can make a version of it that would allow me to re-brand  
these cards so they can be used with little difficulty, I have 2  
options for subsystem ID's in re-branding so a little flexibility  
would be needed.

I didn't exactly make the deal directly myself, it was done through a  
friend of mine who does deals with them and he purchase this lot  
based on me wanting the cards so I currently only have 10 cards in my  
possession but am financially responsible for the remaining 170 cards  
at $15.00 a piece.

I will have in the near future an opportunity to buy 2 more lots, one  
consisting of 236 cards and one with more than 1000 cards (actual  
card count will arrive later this week) and if they cards can be re- 
branded I'd like to purchase them all since the cost would be about  
$5.00 a card instead of the $15.00 I paid for the cards I did get.

The goal here is to sell the cards at a reasonable price after I have  
re-branded them, I was figuring that a $15.00 - $20.00 price tag  
would be a reasonable price for a used 802.11a/b/g/n card if I can  
change them but so far a utility to achieve the goal seems to escape  
me and making further purchases wouldn't make good business sense if  
they're going to be that difficult to use.

Some of the cards are rather interesting in that they are stealth  
cards, they use internal laptop antennas (I have 2 of these models in  
my possession) instead of the regular 3 external whips and for  
whatever reason these cards seem to perform better and this may be  
due to the antennas but is unconfirmed at this time without some more  
thorough testing.

- -- Dale
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