Any USB support planned for Hostap ?

[Pavel Roskin]

On Tue, 23 Mar 2004, Per Weisteen wrote:

> I've just bought this incredible small, nice and silent Procase Cubid
> 3688 Mini-ITX box and supplied it with a dual-LAN VIA EPIA CL6000E
> motherboard and I'd hoped to be able to use it as a firewall replacing
> my bulky 2xLAN + WLAN tower machine running RH9 and hostap.
> Unfortunately there is no room for a PCI or PCMCIA card in the Cubid box
> but it's got 4xUSB ports. I'd hoped there were perhaps hostap support
> for any USB-based WLAN adapter or plans maybe ?

I don't think anything is planned.  There is no such code in CVS and
nothing like that was submitted recently.

If you simply want AP functionality you may want to try to merge
orinoco_usb from Orinoco CVS and HermesAP.  Of course it means coding, but
not as much as adding Prism USB support to hostap.  That would work with
Orinoco USB devices.

You can also buy Orinoco USB, crack it open and put a Prism 2/2.5 card
instead of the Lucent card that's inside.  Then try to merge orinoco_usb
with linux-wlan-ng and load tertiary firmware on it.  To get the firmware,
use this script:
http://www.red-bean.com/~proski/firmware/tertiary-get.tar.gz

Prism USB support in HostAP would be a superior solution, but I'm afraid
it will require much more coding.  HostAP has a very elaborate queue
structure that is designed for local buses and is likely to need massive
changes for USB support.

Prism USB with linux-wlan-ng won't work because Intersil has never
released tertiary firmware for USB.  You can get it from AVS, but as they
put it, "it isn't what you have in mind":
http://lists.linux-wlan.com/pipermail/linux-wlan-user/2004-February/012130.html

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin