Posted in Linux Red Hat/CentOS Wifi

CentOS 4.2 + Orinoco Monitor/Scan

March 5, 2006 - 4 comments

According to http://www.wains.be/?p=25, it was quite a pain to get the orinoco drivers with scan and monitor capabilities..

Being sick at the debianess of Ubuntu, I switched my laptop to the good old and lovely CentOS 4.2.

Having the orinoco_cs drivers with monitor mode running was a question of minutes..

Grab the drivers at the usual place : http://www.projectiwear.org/~plasmahh/orinoco.html
I grabbed this one : http://www.projectiwear.org/~plasmahh/orinoco-0.13e-SN-7.tar.bz2

Untar somewhere on the disk.. make a backup of the good orinoco drivers located at /lib/modules/2.6.9-22.0.2.EL/kernel/drivers/net/wireless

Just type make.. it should compile without any glitches, eject your wireless card, copy the new drivers over the old one, insert your orinoco card and you should be done..

iwpriv eth1 should return this :
[root@pc2](984)# iwpriv eth1
eth1 Available private ioctl :
force_reset (8BE0) : set 0 & get 0
card_reset (8BE1) : set 0 & get 0
set_port3 (8BE2) : set 1 int & get 0
get_port3 (8BE3) : set 0 & get 1 int
set_preamble (8BE4) : set 1 int & get 0
get_preamble (8BE5) : set 0 & get 1 int
set_ibssport (8BE6) : set 1 int & get 0
get_ibssport (8BE7) : set 0 & get 1 int
monitor (8BE8) : set 2 int & get 0
dump_recs (8BFF) : set 0 & get 0

[root@pc2](986)# iwlist eth1 scan
eth1 Scan completed :
Cell 01 – Address: 00:0F:66:xx:xx:xx
ESSID:”xxx”
Mode:Managed
Frequency:2.412GHz (Channel 1)
Quality:128/92 Signal level=-64 dBm Noise level=-95 dBm
Encryption key:on

Kismet should enable monitor mode by itself, otherwise :

root@home:~ # iwpriv eth0 monitor m c
m – one of the following
0 – disable monitor mode
1 – enable monitor mode with Prism2 header info prepended
to packet (ARPHRD_IEEE80211_PRISM)
2 – enable monitor mode with no Prism2 info (ARPHRD_IEEE80211)
c – channel to monitor

Comments

Henryfd

June 10, 2006 - 4:25

Good Job

Jim White

March 6, 2007 - 18:20

I just installed CentOS 4.4 and I want to go wireless.
If I get an Orinoco gold (or silver) will the OS detect
it right out of the box?

Any advice is helpful

Jim (linux newb)

Sébastien Wains

March 6, 2007 - 19:49

Hi Jim,

I never had any problem under CentOS with my Orinoco Silver (hacked into a Gold), it works perfectly out of the box.
The only problem you may have is getting WPA or WPA2 working (see http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=304217&page=2 ).

And by default, as explained in my post, scan and monitor mode do (did.. back then) not work by default.
Scan mode is useful for using with wifi-radar, networkmanager and the likes.

I got my silver for €15 on ebay while gold version where still being sold for €60+.
The silver by default only allows WEP 64 bit but hacking the card into a gold really is a question of minutes : http://www.wains.be/index.php/2005/06/17/hacking-the-orinoco-silver-into-an-orinoco-gold/

Be careful though, I know there are many different “orinoco” branded card.
This is what mine looks like : http://www.hardware-one.com/reviews/barricadeWR/images/orinco_small.jpg

Hope this helps.

Sébastien Wains homepage » Why I’m switching from RedHat (and friends) to Debian (and friends)

August 25, 2007 - 12:32

[...] It slowly started with my desktop OS, when I moved from Fedora to Ubuntu. (and CentOS before Fedora, until came the need for wireless with ipw3945 on my new laptop [was using Orinoco Gold on my old CentOS 4 laptop]). [...]

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