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NAME

urtw — Realtek RTL8187L/RTL8187B USB IEEE 802.11b/g wireless network device

SYNOPSIS

urtw* at uhub? port ?

DESCRIPTION

The urtw driver supports USB 802.11b/g wireless adapters based on the Realtek RTL8187L and RTL8187B.

These are the modes the urtw 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 urtw driver can be configured to use Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) or Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA1 and WPA2). WPA2 is the current encryption standard for wireless networks. It is strongly recommended that neither WEP nor WPA1 are used as the sole mechanism to secure wireless communication, due to serious weaknesses. WPA1 is disabled by default and may be enabled using the option "wpaprotos wpa1,wpa2". For standard WPA networks which use pre-shared keys (PSK), keys are configured using the "wpakey" option. WPA-Enterprise networks require use of the wpa_supplicant package. The urtw driver relies on the software 802.11 stack for both encryption and decryption of data frames.

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

HARDWARE

The following adapters should work:

EXAMPLES

The following example scans for available networks:

The following hostname.if(5) example configures urtw0 to join network “mynwid”, using WPA key “mywpakey”, obtaining an IP address using DHCP:

join mynwid wpakey mywpakey
inet autoconf

SEE ALSO

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

Realtek Semiconductor: https://www.realtek.com/en

HISTORY

The urtw device driver first appeared in OpenBSD 4.5.

AUTHORS

The urtw driver was written by Weongyo Jeong <weongyo@FreeBSD.org>.

CAVEATS

This driver does not support powersave mode.