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NAME

upgt — Conexant/Intersil PrismGT SoftMAC USB IEEE 802.11b/g wireless network device

SYNOPSIS

upgt* at uhub? port ?

DESCRIPTION

The upgt driver supports the USB 2.0 Conexant/Intersil PrismGT series wireless adapters based on the GW3887 chipset.

These are the modes the upgt driver can operate in:

BSS mode

Also known as infrastructure mode, this is used when associating with an access point, through which all traffic passes. This mode is the default.

monitor mode

In this mode the driver is able to receive packets without associating with an access point. This disables the internal receive filter and enables the card to capture packets from networks which it wouldn't normally have access to, or to scan for access points.

The upgt driver can be configured to use Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) or Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA-PSK and WPA2-PSK). WPA is the current encryption standard for wireless networks. It is strongly recommended that WEP not be used as the sole mechanism to secure wireless communication, due to serious weaknesses in it. The upgt driver relies on the software 802.11 stack for both encryption and decryption of data frames.

The upgt driver can be configured at runtime with ifconfig(8) or on boot with hostname.if(5).

FILES

The driver needs a firmware file which is loaded when an interface is brought up:

A prepackaged version of the firmware can be installed using fw_update(1).

HARDWARE

The following adapters should work:

EXAMPLES

The following example scans for available networks:

The following hostname.if(5) example configures upgt0 to join network “mynwid”, using WPA key “mywpakey”, obtaining an IP address using DHCP:

nwid mynwid
wpakey mywpakey
dhcp

SEE ALSO

arp(4), ifmedia(4), intro(4), netintro(4), usb(4), hostname.if(5), ifconfig(8)

HISTORY

The upgt driver first appeared in OpenBSD 4.3.

AUTHORS

The upgt driver was written by Marcus Glocker <mglocker@openbsd.org>.

The hardware specification was reverse engineered by the people at http://www.prism54.org.

CAVEATS

The upgt driver just supports the USB 2.0 devices (GW3887 chipset) but not the USB 1.0 devices containing the NET2280, ISL3880, and ISL3886 chipsets. Some further efforts would be necessary to add USB 1.0 support to the driver.