[talk] USB wireless: a quick note

[George Rosamond]

I have to use wireless USB on a certain laptop due to the idiotic BIOS
whitelist.

Quick note about drivers on OpenBSD.

I have found most are using urtwn(4) which is on the flakey side,
including that one a bunch of us bought from Maker Faire last year.

But I bought a few at Microcenter, and one happened to use run(4) with
RT5390. So far, so good... but happy to have a Ralink chipset. The
label is "Tenda" with the model W311MI.

g

[Charles Sprickman]

Post by George Rosamond
I have to use wireless USB on a certain laptop due to the idiotic BIOS
whitelist.

I stumbled on this recently while googling (dont own a laptop with
these shenanigans, but was curious about what people do to
workaround the issue):

http://www.endeer.cz/bios.tools/bios.html

I suspect its a little dated, and Im assuming youre talking Lenovo,
which you may not be.

Oh, this looks more recent:

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_unauthorized_MiniPCI_network_card

Looks pretty neat, hopefully they havent made the checks more
complex in later models.

C

Post by George Rosamond
Quick note about drivers on OpenBSD.
I have found most are using urtwn(4) which is on the flakey side,
including that one a bunch of us bought from Maker Faire last year.
But I bought a few at Microcenter, and one happened to use run(4) with
RT5390. So far, so good... but happy to have a Ralink chipset. The
label is "Tenda" with the model W311MI.
g
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[George Rosamond]

Post by Charles Sprickman

Post by George Rosamond
I have to use wireless USB on a certain laptop due to the idiotic BIOS
whitelist.

I stumbled on this recently while googling (dont own a laptop with
these shenanigans, but was curious about what people do to
http://www.endeer.cz/bios.tools/bios.html
I suspect its a little dated, and Im assuming youre talking Lenovo,
which you may not be.

Lenovo I am.

Post by Charles Sprickman
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_unauthorized_MiniPCI_network_card
Looks pretty neat, hopefully they havent made the checks more
complex in later models.

So there's a bios fix for it... from a third party dev. But I need to
reflash it since I updated to a more recent BIOS.

In the spirit of laziness, I went USB wireless.. .but I'll flash again
at some point.

Utterly foolish attempt at "security"... I mean, is this a measure
against someone swapping your wireless card? Was there some wave of
this happening at some point? Childish. . .

g

[Jim B.]

[snip]

Post by George Rosamond
Utterly foolish attempt at "security"... I mean, is this a measure
against someone swapping your wireless card? Was there some wave of
this happening at some point? Childish. . .
g

Interesting that you mention that. That exact thing happened at
a project where I was the project lead. A certain consultant had
performed an unauthorized command on a production router, screwing
up the network during the day (this was at Cablevision back about
2000). It was serious enough that the CV network staff traced
through logs to find out who had done this dastardly deed.

The certain consultant became aware of what they were doing for
discovery and he then went and swapped out his wireless card
(PCMCIA in those days) with another consultant's card - but was
observed doing so and he mumbled that he needed to "test his
wireless for a couple of days".

The network staff identified the card and PC now belonging to the
innocent consultant and accused him of disrupting the network.
A large argument started, and it then came out that the network
card had just been replaced by the guilty consultant.

Larger argument began including me with the guilty consultant.

It didn't end well. Guilty consultant was immediately removed
from the premesis and the project, but for reasons obscure to me
was not fired.

But that was a long time ago in a data center far, far away....


Jim B.

[Brian Coca]

he didn't think of just changing the MAC in software??
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