I can also recommend Cedric Blancher’s recent SecureCon talk (linked from the mail) as it’s fairly interesting. Also linked from the mail is Wifitap which is

a proof of concept for communication over WiFi networks using traffic injection.

You should especially check out the video cracking WEP in 10 easy steps linked to from the Wifitap site. When you’ve done that, reconfigure your access point to use WPA instead. Then read the end of the thread discussing how to crack WPA and return to your AP’s configuration and set a better password.

receive_packet failed on eth1: Network is down

The only thing I noticed was that even though I explicitly set the rate to 11M, it was set to 54M after running dhclient. So it seemed like dhclient was doing something funny. But I was unable to pinpoint the exact problem and left it be for the time.

Today I found a solution in this thread. It’s not a permanent solution, rather some kind of a hack, but it works.

First bring up the interface.

# ifconfig eth1 up

Next, and this is the key, associate the interface at the same time as dhclient is DHCPDISCOVERing. Run this command in one terminal.

# dhclient eth1

When you get output similar to this

DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7

you run this command in another terminal.

# iwconfig eth1 channel 11 rate 11M essid "Erik" enc <secret password>

Of course you’ll have to replace “Erik” etc with your settings.

And, once again, I’m able to say: the wireless network card (AirPort Extreme) is now working.

Steps to reproduce (assuming you’re using the precompiled debian kernel):

# apt-get install bcm43xx-fwcutter bcm43xx-modules-2.6.15-1-powerpc

If you’re not presented with an option to install the firmware, execute

# dpkg-reconfigure bcm43xx-fwcutter

Then load the module and bring up the interface

# modprobe bcm43xx
# ifconfig eth1 up

The following command should give you the necessary information about your network

# iwlist eth1 scan

Then configure you wireless interface with your specific settings. I did

# iwconfig eth1 channel 11
# iwconfig eth1 rate 11M
# iwconfig eth1 enc <secret password>
# iwconfig eth1 essid "Erik"

The last step, getting an ip address

# dhclient eth1

Surf!

Links to more information:

• http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-409194.html
• https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/bcm43xx-dev/