| Posted by: | Dekonta |
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| Subject: | Orinoco BAP errors understood. |
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| Date: | 05:00:25 15/07/2003 |
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I'm posting this in the hopes of saving others the ooldes of time I spent isolating and then working around this issue.
My platform/hardware: Redhat 9, kernel 2.4.20. Orinoco Gold 802.11b with latest firmware (8.72), Orinoco kernel drivers patched at 0.13b for rfmon functionality. Kismet 2.8.1.
If you have anything like my setup, you'll probably run into this nasty error message in /var/log/messages:
kernel: eth1: Error -5 writing packet to BAP
The messages generally start within seconds of putting the card into monitor mode and enabling the channel hopper. They can be somewhat intermittent; if they don't show up within five seconds of going into monitor mode, you're usually all set for that session.
The cause? At least for me, I found out that I could reliably reproduce this error when I insert my card into the laptop and enable monitor mode without having associated my card with an AP. Since my default eth1 network config includes DHCP, when you insert the card into its PCMCIA slot, it immediately tries to raise eth1 and starts sending out DHCP requests.
*** Starting kismet_monitor during this time will almost always result in the BAP errors and inability to sniff. ***
My solution? Disable the hotplug event for the card that causes the interface to automatically be raised when inserted. In Redhat, edit /etc/hotplug/net.agent and comment out the "exec /sbin/ifup $INTERFACE" line. Now you can insert the card, raise eth1 manually if you wish, or put the card in monitor mode, change your MAC address, or whatever else you'd like without that pesky autoraise occuring.
Since doing this, I haven't had one BAP error.
And life is SO much better...
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