Wireless Hacks

Hermes AP

Enable BSS master mode on Hermes-based radios.

Hermes-based radio cards (like the tremendously popular but confusingly named Lucent/Orinoco/Avaya/Proxim silver and gold cards) are notoriously difficult to operate in BSS [Hack #12] master mode. By design, the cards themselves are actually not able to provide BSS master services on their own. You might find this surprising, since they are the radio card embedded in the original AirPort AP, as well as the RG1000, RG1100, AP1000, and many others. Before these cards can operate as a BSS master, they need additional firmware uploaded to the card. This tertiary firmware is uploaded to the card’s RAM, and is lost if the card loses power. To make matters even more difficult, the firmware in question is licensed software, and can’t legally be distributed by anyone but the manufacturer.

The ingenious Hermes AP project (http://hunz.org/hermesap.html) addresses both of these tricky issues. It consists of a set of modified drivers, a utility for uploading the tertiary firmware, and a simple script that downloads the firmware from Proxim’s public FTP server. Hermes AP isn’t trivial to get running, but can be the perfect piece of software if you absolutely need a host-based Orinoco AP.

To get Hermes AP running, you need a kernel with Dev FS enabled. This allows the kernel to manage the /dev directory, dynamically creating device files for every physical device that the kernel supports. Run a make menuconfig, and select Code maturity ...