Table of Contents
DEPRECATED - iwl3945
Note: This page is about the iwl3945 driver. For the older ipw3945/ipwraw driver, see ipw3945.
Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG, mac80211 driver
Iwl3945 is the new driver for the Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG wireless chipset. It includes new features like:
- Managed and monitor mode support in one driver
- Enhanced injection support
- Multiple interfaces on one device - use the aircrack suite on a monitor interface while remaining associated on a managed interface
- Full radiotap support, for both incoming and outgoing packets
- No more binary regulatory daemon needed, regulatory enforcement is done by the firmware
The driver is based on the mac80211 stack, so the usual requirements apply (aircrack-ng 1.0-rc1, a recent version of libnl, a fairly new kernel, etc.)
Installing the driver
Starting with 2.6.24, the driver is included in the kernel. Injection requires 2.6.25 or later. The compat-wireless-old package must be installed and patched to get injection support on 2.6.25 and 2.6.26. For 2.6.27 and newer, no special patch is needed, follow the common instructions for mac80211.
*UPDATE* Apparently the new version of compat-wireless should *not* be patched and should work out of the box. more can be found here: http://forum.aircrack-ng.org/index.php?topic=2898.0
Installing and patching compat-wireless
- Install your kernel headers and sources, as well as all packages required for building kernel modules.
- Download compat-wireless from here. For 2.6.26 and older, use compat-wireless-old, for newer versions (currently 2.6.27-rcX), use compat-wireless-2.6.
- Untar the archive to your home directory. This will create a dated directory ~/compat-wireless-DATE, where DATE is the build date of the package.
- Download the fragmentation patch, and apply it to the compat-wireless package. This is needed to make attacks -5 and -7 work.
- Cd to the compat-wireless directory, and run “make” to build the package.
- Install the package with “make install”, then load it with “make load”.
- If you get errors during “make load”, reboot and all should work.
Using iwl3945 with aircrack-ng
Before using the card with aircrack-ng, you must create a monitor interface, using the command
airmon-ng start wlan0
where wlan0 is the interface name of the card. This will create a monitor interface called “mon0” (prefix changeable using the $MON_PREFIX environment variable, e.g. a $MON_PREFIX of “rtap” will result in an interface called “rtap0”). Next, run
airodump-ng -c <channel>,<channel> mon0
where <channel> is the channel the target AP is running on, while mon0 is the monitor interface you created in the first step. You must enter the channel twice, e.g. “-c 3,3”, otherwise it will reset to channel 1. This is a bug in the driver, and a fix for it has been scheduled for inclusion into the kernel. After this, use “mon0” as the interface name for all monitoring/injection tasks.
Useful links / info
Troubleshooting Tips
- Chopchop and Fragmentation attacks do not work: There is a report (see this thread) which indicates kernel 2.6.30 causes them to fail.