This afternoon and I are supposed to go war driving around the Detroit area. I’m just putting the finishing touches on the notebook for logging everything. I’m getting Ethereal (a wonder packet capture/analyizer program) going, so Kismet can log to it via Wiretap. After this all I’ll go clear out my car, hook everything up, then head down to the prearranged meeting place. < giggle >

Ethereal is compiling away in the background, and empty bowl of Raisin Bran is sitting next to me, and some random programming from FoodTV is coming off the TV. I think I’ll go change the channel. You know, I really hate waiting for software to compile. It’s the best way to do things, though, I guess… Oh well…

Does anyone have a spare, two channel PCI IDE controller? I don’t care what speed it is, but DMA66 or DMA100 would be nice. I think mine is dead… I keep getting timeout errors when reading a certain part of a drive while in multi-user mode under FreeBSD. I wish I knew what was wrong, but when the drive times out, the whole box hangs. It’s irritating. I don’t like having to walk downstairs to reset my file server all the time.

Great… It seems that the latest Orinoco Client Manager does a “soft upgrade” of the firmware to the latest version. No wonder I haven’t been able to upgrade it myself. I think I might finally be downloading an old version so I can get the bloody firmware BACK to 6.06. Yay! That means no putting the Orinoco card in my XP box, though. Oh well. If anything, I just hope that this process is repeatable. It sucks having to deal with all of this. I just want it working.

Now if I had of left well enough alone and just slapped the card in a linux box to begin with, these problems wouldn’t be here… Oh well.

MORNING UPDATE:

Every version of the client manager seems to do this, but only to the latest version the client manager supports. So, who knows what version… The more I think about it, the more I’m thinking that the problems I’m having are related to something that I somehow hosed in my LFS install. I knew I should have backed it up before I started playing with PCMCIA. The reason I think this is because the NIC *DOES* work fine under Windows, and if I insert another PCMCIA wireless NIC (the Belkin) the box will core dump/hang this way too. I just wonder what it is… Oh well. I’m probably going to blow it away tonight and slap a Slackware install on it. Upgrade the kernel and PCMCIA and see if it still dies. I just hope not.

Well, I finally got the wireless stuff working under Linux. I was browsing the web and pinging to my heart’s content.

But, I can’t make kismet work properly. With the lowest firmware version it doesn’t grab anything. With the highest, kismet crashes the PCMCIA driver looking like something’s failing and the card isn’t able to handle data that fast. Anything in between I can’t get to flash for some reason. So, I thought I’d try the absolute latest PCMCIA card services. Installed those, didn’t help. Installed the original version that I was using (3.2.1), rebooted, now the box core dumps every time it goes to load the PCMCIA stuff. But only with the kernel that I made. I think I need to somehow get in there and rip out all the PCMCIA stuff and start over. It wasn’t hard to make it work, I can do it again. However, I want it to just work.

Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to get the card flashed to a known-working firmware level with a Windows 2000 notebook at work. I hope. I don’t want to have to install 2K to fix things here. Gah, all I want is kismet to work so I can keep going on the rest of this project.

I’m waiting for e2fsprogs-1.25 to compile. See, it’s one of the many parts of Linux From Scratch that need to be compiled. I’m making a LFS installation to be customized and used for war driving. I think I’m going to have the standard suite of tools (kismet, airsnort, WEPcrack, ethereal, etc) installed along with Rox and Sawfish. I think that some nice light-weight front end software will work well, but I still like a GUI of some sort so I can have a bunch of windows open all at the same time on one display.

I’m also thinking that having everything running as root, automatically logging in might not be a bad idea. I know it’d normally be a security problem, but if the machine is completely inaccessable remotely, that might work. We’ll see… I’d like to keep it completely graphical, just to look nice. Maybe a graphical boot screen, but that would require X to use the fbdev server. I *think* the box I’m making this for has fbdev support, so we’ll see. Getting it working is more important than looking pretty. But pretty is still very important.

Anyway, we’ll see how it goes…