[kismac] Re: How do you get this %%$$ing program to work!!!????

At 11:05 AM -0400 2004/04/30, GDevice@xxxxxxx wrote:

 Anyway... As far as KisMAC goes, I can only rate this program as 3 0r 4
 on a scale of 10. What it is capable of doing is very nice and I like the
 interface. But with such a VERY limited scope of card support, I can't
 give it a very high rating.

Limited card support?!? What on earth are you talking about? Prism2 is by far the most common 802.11b chipset in use anywhere in the world, and is well supported by KisMac. The Lucent/Orinoco and Cisco cards are well supported by KisMac and common in certain sectors of the industry where they're willing to pay more to get quality devices -- note that the Apple Airport card is based on the Lucent/Orinoco device.

The 802.11a/g devices from Atheros and Broadcom have less support, because the vendors do not allow information about these devices to be disseminated. The only reason anyone other than Microsoft and other commercial OSes have any support for them at all is because people like Mick have done a lot of reverse-engineering work to figure out how these cards work (without any real documentation available), and then written software to support them. Atheros has helped a little by recently making a driver available that runs on top of their Hardware Access Layer, but it's been difficult porting this driver around. Broadcom doesn't even go that far.

The Atmel and ADMtek chipsets are far less common, and you just happened to buy both of them before you found out what the real problem was.

                             Plus the fact that this is suppose to be a
 MAC program, but support for the Apple card is limited. It seems the
 developers would have gotten the AirPort cards working FIRST before
 moving on to other Chip sets.

Excuse me?!? Mick has the best support for the Apple Airport card in the business. There is little he can do for the Airport Extreme card, because that's based on the Broadcom chipset for which the manufacturer is being a real ass and not releasing any information to non-commercial sources, and even then you have to sign an extremely restrictive NDA. These things are not well supported anywhere in any Open Source project or Operating system, for that reason.


Compare KisMac to the other available WiFi scanning utilities for Macintosh, as well as for other platforms. I don't think you'll find support for as broad an array of cards on any other program or platform, and certainly not support for such a broad array of features.

To do the same with anything else would require a half-dozen different programs, few of which could run at the same time, and might not all run on the same OS.


Compare to NetStumbler. Compare to Kismet. Compare to anything else you like. I challenge you to find a more complete program with support for a wider array of cards anywhere else on any OS you like.

--
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@xxxxxxxxx>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
    -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.

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