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By Matthieu, 2012-11-07 22:08

I have a few old reliable AR5005G (5212, PCI 168c:0013) cards, both MiniPCI and Cardbus from the heyday of Wireless-G back in the early ’00s. Back then, Atheros 500x series cards were THE cards to have if you wanted to have some fun with aircrack, or if you just wanted your WiFi to actually WORK, especially under Linux. The madwifi (aka ath_pci) drivers were probably the most stable wireless drivers at the time. Even on Windows, you could use 3rd party drivers to put the cards in monitor mode and capture packets.

Times have changed and madwifi has been superseded by ath5k (and indirectly ath9k).

For some reason I decided to install Ubuntu 12.04 on an old Fujitsu Lifebook (Pentium III 600MHz, upgraded 512MB RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon M4) without built-in wireless, using a Netgear WPN511 Cardbus adapter. I expected everything to work as it did in the old days, but for some reason the WiFi wouldn’t stay connected.

It seems the hardware encryption capabilites on the card don’t quite support WPA2/CCMP-AES, even though the ath5k driver says it does. So the solution is to disable hardware encryption support:

echo "options ath5k nohwcrypt=1" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/ath5k.conf

Then reboot, or reload the ath5k module (modprobe -rv ath5k, modprobe -v ath5k).

Now I can enjoy my surprisingly not-extremely-slow 10-year old laptop wirelessly.

http://madwifi-project.org/