Setting up NDIS Wireless Networking in PC-BSD/FreeBSD

November 27, 2006 at 1:07 pm, Category: Unix, by Mike

So you’ve got your spanking new PC-BSD (or FreeBSD) installation on your laptop, but now you need to setup wireless internet…. This can be a real pain in the a$$ so I wrote this guide to show how I setup wireless networking using NDIS.

NDIS allows windows wireless drivers to be converted and used in UNIX based os’s. This is very useful as there are quite a few wireless cards which aren’t supported directly by FreeBSD.

I’ve seen plenty of people struggling with NDIS in the PCBSD forum, so I thought I’d share how I got NDIS working in case its any use to anyone.

1. Download FreeBSD source using CVSUP by doing

cvsup  /root/standard-supfile

2. Run the NDISGEN windows driver converter by doing

/usr/sbin/ndisgen

3. This creates a *.ko file. When I ran NDISGEN it this was created in my home directory.

4. Copy the .ko file to /boot/kernel/. In my case this was

cp  /usr/home/me/i2220ntx_sys.ko /boot/kernel 

5. Now edit loader.conf by doing

ee  /boot/loader.conf 

6. Add the following lines at the bottom of loader.conf

ndis_load=”YES”
if_ndis_load=”YES”
i2220ntx_sys_load=”YES”

*** The i2220ntx_sys part is replaced by the name of your *.ko file ***

7. Now lastly edit rc.conf by doing

ee /etc/rc.conf

8. I disabled the standard network card on my laptop as it made booting quicker so I have the following at the top of my rc.conf.

#Wireless only
NIC=”ndis” 

If you want both wireless and wired it would be (where rl is your network card).

#Wireless and Standard
NIC=”rl ndis” 

9. At the bottom of rc.conf add the following

ifconfig_ndis0=”inet netmask 255.255.255.0 ssid  linksys”
defaultrouter=”"
hostname=”PCBSD.localhost” 

** Make sure you input the ssid (name of your wireless connection) part of this otherwise it won’t work **

8. Lastly reboot freebsd. Once this is done open Konsole, login as root and type ifconfig. If everything is setup correctly NDIS will be listed and will show as “status: associated”

9. Thats it!

Hope this is helpful to anyone struggling to setup NDIS