Installing Orinoco Gold WLAN Cards with Monitor Mode Under Linux

The following is a terse description of how to install the Orinoco wireless PCMCIA drivers on Suse 9.3 and Gentoo Linux.

• Install the linux kernel sources package, (and the development tools for C/C++ if you haven't already), using YAST.
• Assuming you're running the same version of kernel as the one you downloaded, go into the /usr/src/linux directory, and then run cp /proc/config.gz .; gzip -d config.gz; mv config .config to get the .config file into the correct place.
• Confirm that the symbolic link /lib/modules/your versionbuild points to the sources you just downloaded.
• Ensure that the directory /lib/modules/kernel-version/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ exists. If it does not, you need to compile the Orinoco drivers as modules into your kernel (go into /usr/src/kernel-version/ and run make menuconfig and go through Device Drivers, Networking, Wireless, and select the two Hermes modules).
• In the /usr/src/linux/ directory, run make prepare-all (found this on the SuSE mailing lists archive!). This ensures that scripts/genksyms/genksyms exists and works when it's needed later on.
• Download the latest Orinoco drivers (I used version 0.15).
  Update: Version 0.13e is likely to be better for monitor mode: version 0.15 does not provide the monitor mode ioctl(). See below.
  Note: if you are using the updated version of this Howto, ignore the remainder of this bulleted list! The old instructions are for the 0.15 version of the drivers.
• Unzip the drivers, and then edit the Makefile to comment out the lines relating to PCI cards (68 to 71). As far as I am aware (i.e. this is a guess!), if you are using a PCMCIA card you do not need the PCI modules. The reason for doing this is that on my installation the make failed on the PCI module.
• Download the patch to the v0.15 drivers (scroll down), from the Kismet site to enable signal strength monitoring. Place the diff file in the same directory as the unzipped drivers, and run patch -p1 < orinoco-0.15rc2-dargorn-02.diff (or the relevant filename). The result should be three patched files.
  Note: if you use the 0.13e drivers and the relevant patch with a kernel of version 2.6.11 or higher, there will be compilation errors. See the updated version of these notes below.
• Run make and then make install.
• Run /etc/init.d/pcmcia restart.
• Now try iwconfig eth1 mode monitor (with the appropriate interface ID for your machine), and see if it works (you can check by running iwconfig eth1 and checking the mode there. Note that without the patch, running iwpriv eth1 does not list any monitor ioctl(), which precludes the use of iwlist eth1 scanning. With the patch the ioctl() entry still doesn't appear, but scanning and signal strength do work.

Following more in depth testing and investigation, I found that the above procedure does not in fact give true monitor mode (in the sense that the monitor ioctl() does not appear in the list output by iwpriv. The following does appear to work better -- comments welcome!

• Download version 0.13e revision 8 of the Patched Orinoco drivers. These are Dave Gibson's drivers already patched for monitor mode, which have the compilation bug under kernel 2.6.11 fixed.
• These drivers should enable you to work with the newest Orinoco firmware (8.72), but the above page notes that it appears some users are missing packets... See what you find. To check or upgrade your firmware version, you'll need to put the card into a Windows-based machine, and use the Proxim firmware upgrade utility. For this to work properly you are likely to need to Proxim Orinoco driver installed too.
• Having obtained the patched drivers, you should simply unzip them, and run make.
• Next, cp *.ko /lib/modules/kernel-version/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/, to install them. For some reason make install puts the modules into the /lib/modules/kernel-version/extra/ directory, so don't use it.
• If you now restart PCMCIA services, /etc/init.d/pcmcia restart, the new drivers should be loaded.
• Run iwpriv eth1 (or whatever your interface name is) to see whether the monitor mode now appears in the list of ioctl() calls. If you don't have this command, install Jean Tourrilhe's wireless-tools package (under Gentoo this is net-wireless/wireless-tools).
• To run tcpdump on the interface, you'll also want to perform channel hopping. You can use Snax's Channel hopper. Compile using gcc -o hopper orinoco_hopper.c. Then you can just ./hopper to start it off. Running tcpdump eth1 should then produce some output (assuming there are one or more active wireless networks around).
• Note that the channel hopper will interfere with iwlist. In my case to get iwlist to produce any output again, the channel hopper had to be terminated, and then PCMCIA services restarted. You may have better luck: if you do please let me know! ;-).

Note: I made use of a page about Redhat, Kismet and the Orinoco cards to find out some of the above. Another useful page is Airsnort's Orinoco page.

A useful page on how to force cards to use a, b or g mode is  http://madwifi.sourceforge.net/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=iwpriv_extensions .