Atheros AR5006/7* & KisMAC

[sYnie]

Hello,

 

I'm an owner of a little EeePC with a Atheros AR5007EG wifi card. As most of the AR5006/7* users, I do have massive problems with this hardware using OS X. Sure, there are some workarounds like with IO80211Family.kext and KisMAC, but it's kind of annoying. Even though I've got it managed to run this workaround in background using some little helpers, it's pretty annoying.

W-Lan doesn't work after sleep, doesn't work after reboot when the PC crashed, is generally unstable, and so on.

 

I thought about what we could do, to at least improve this workaround with KisMAC. Right at the moment, we need KisMAC to make the Airport know, that there are wireless networks. So what does KisMAC exactly do?

 

During scanning, it loads another wifi driver and sets the Airport to passive mode.

Try this:

Run KisMAC and scan. Then open a terminal and run the following command:

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport -I

 

Even after stopping the scan, this shows the Airport is in passive mode:

"op mode: monitor"

 

I think this is the key. So what does KisMAC do? I'm not quite sure yet, but I got some assumptions. Have a look at

/Applications/KisMAC.app/Contens/Resources

 

You'll find a lot of different Resources. Also the Drivers which are used for Airport-Driver replacement during scan. I'm not quite sure yet, but I think it's the "WLanDriver.kext". You'll also find some scripts, which handle this driver. They're all called "viha_*.sh". I've tried to handle this driver using those scripts, but it fails for some reasons. I tried to register this kext manually, but this also fails, or leads to no results.

WLanDriver.kext and those scripts belong to a network stumbler utility called "Viha". You can read more about it here:

http://www.dopesquad.net/security/

 

I tried to use the pre-compiled drivers from this site, but it fails telling me, that those drivers aren't made for my system. Unfortunately, I don't have enough space on this EeePC to use XCode. If I had had enough space, I would have recompiled the driver on this system. I think then it would fit. Anyway, I tried to recompile the driver on another iMac (also Leopard). I can install the kext, but without any results.

During my next investigations, I'm gonna try to use the re-compiled kext with those viha scripts.

 

But due to KisMAC can replace this WLanDriver.kext while scanning, it shouldn't be the problem. If Viha doesn't lead me to any results, I'm gonna read through the KisMAC source code in order to find how they replace those drivers and how they put the Airport to monitor mode.

 

Cause if we get to know, how to use this driver and how to use the Viha stumbler, we're quite a bit closer to get to know, what's wrong with the current driver. Also we could write a small workaround for the current driver in order not to have to use KisMAC anymore to make the Airport see networks.

Maybe putting the Airport to Passive/Monitor Mode does the trick. Basically that's what this Viha driver does.

 

Just wanted to share those thoughts. Maybe someone already tried something like this. Maybe someone has already experimented with the Viha Utility. Would like to hear your thoughts and investigations.

 

I'm gonna keep you updated here.

 

Mario

 

Ps.: Has anyone heard about the "KisMAC Driver Utility"? It was part of the earliest releases of KisMAC. It was a stand alone application, which had the ability to replace various drivers at runtime. Does anyone still have a copy of it? Or does anyone know where we I can find it?

[WinSucks_4ever]

Yep your right

 

Its enoying always start KisMAC.

 

I have to reboot almost 15 times to get WIFI working

[Embio]

just buy a replacement card from ebay - the Dell 1390s work a treat. I was annoyed at being told this all the time, but I bit the bullet, bought one, and its actually a better card than whats in my Macbook!