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Knowledge Base > Wireless > Madwifi driver support for CDRouter

Madwifi driver support for CDRouter

CDRouter 4.2 adds experimental support for the madwifi wireless driver to support PCI and miniPCI based Atheros wireless cards. The madwifi driver is an alternative to using DriverLoader from Linuxant.

NOTE: At this time, only limited testing of Atheros and madwifi combinations has been completed.

In order to use the madwifi driver, the latest stable version of the madwifi driver should be installed on the CDRouter test host.

At run time, CDRouter determines the driver interface to used for a wireless interface. CDRouter will first check for DriverLoader. If the wireless interface was not created by DriverLoader, CDRouter will use the madwifi driver interface if the interface name starts with ath (for example ath0). As a last resort, CDRouter will attempt to use the Linux Wireless Extension interface.

     testvar lanInterface ath0

Caveats

There are a few known caveats when using madwifi:

When testing Basic or WEP configurations, the BSSID of the access point must be specified in the CDRouter configuration file using the testvar lanBSSID. The madwifi driver will not automatically connect the wireless card by configuring the SSID only. The BSSID is required, and CDRouter is not performing a wireless scan for Basic or WEP configurations.
```
   testvar lanBSSID 00:1E:2A:64:B0:18
```

CDRouter is not currently reading the wireless card capabilities when madwifi is used. No checks will be performed to verify that a card supports WPA or WPA2 before attempting to configure these settings. As a result, CDRouter will report that it can not determine the wireless capabilities and will keep running.

INFO: 12:22:36| Wireless interface madwifi is using the madwifi interface
INFO: 12:22:36| Can not determine wireless capabilities for ath0

Only the ath_pci driver module has been tested. The newer ath5k and ath9k drivers have not yet been tested.

Additional Information

For more help on using madwifi, please contact support@qacafe.com.