Folks

I'm trying to get the DG834GT working in wireless client mode. I've done the http://192.168.0.1/setup.cgi?todo=debug trick through the web server and started poking around at various promising candidates.

In /proc/net/ath there are a number of files - the two of most interest are ap_cli and ap_cfg.

echo {parameter} {value} > /proc/net/ath/ap_cfg       will set a wireless setting
cat /proc/net/ath/ap_cli       will print out the success / failure

You can get a list of all possible wireless settings from /etc/ath/ap_cfg.save

This seems to be the router's internal parameters as they're not very user friendly. On the other hand if you use ath_cli it is far more user friendly and do get / set from there.

echo help connect > /proc/net/ath/ap_cli
cat /proc/net/ath/ap_cli     will give you a list of all valid commands

echo get config > /proc/net/ath/ap_cli
cat /proc/net/ath/ap_cli     will give you the current status

I've set the operationmode variable to sta (wireless client) and joined a BSSID. Running a get status confirms this.

Unfortunately what the ap_cli utility is telling me isn't being implemented on the wireless interface itself. Whatever parameters I change makes no difference to the wlan0.

Does anybody know how I can get the wireless interface to implement my changes to the config?  I've tried ifconfig the interface as well but it receives no packets.

Cheers,

Paul.

Use the ath_cli command (/usr/sbin/ath_cli) to manipulate the interface - it does work, but /usr/sbin/rc and its minions will reset it if the interface status changes too much.  If you stop /usr/sbin/rc you lose the ADSL interface (which is nontrivial to do manually).

Any changes should be made in the nvram so that the apps that read it will find the change.  The wifi_xxx ones are the main ones.

Note that the main atheros driver module (ath_ap_mips) may not in fact be capable of client mode, if its name is descriptive enough.

Mmmm, I feared that the driver module might not be capable of running in client mode.

Does anybody know of another wireless router using the same atheros chipset capable of running client mode? If so we could try replacing the module.

(Last edited by evanspa1 on 1 Jun 2005, 21:51)

The hardware is the same as a whole class of routers such as the USR9106 and Inventel Livebox.  It's the same reference design with a different case & slightly different firmware.

I was intending to get the source of all the devices that I could find to see what I could borrow, but never got around to it.

You might even be able to get madwifi to run on the box.. doesn't sound too impossible - IIRC there's a HAL for mips.  The only issue might be the netgear kernel is heavily patched already... it took me a bit of tweaking to get jffs2 into it for example.