OpenBSD developer Reyk Floeter writes in article Proactive wireless networks with hostapd(8) about his latest tool and how it can be used in wireless warfare. Defend your wireless networks from rogue nodes or "discourage" neighbours from occupying "your" frequencies.
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I've used OpenBSD, and in many ways I love it...and hate it. The security is awesome, nothing else comes close, and this latest wireless feature (hostapd) continues that fine tradition.
Where it falls down is on the setup - you've got to read copious quantities of documentation, ask on the mailing list (and inevitably be told to RTFM), and generally rack your brains to manually edit a bunch of configuration files in order to do something that could be made simple with a short setup script.
I still keep an OpenBSD partition on my hard drive, and play with it as time allows. Just a pity that I'm too dumb to get all these great security features to do actual work.
My suggestion to the developers - write some setup scripts. It doesn't have to be GUI, just something that a mere mortal could understand. If I could run something like "/sbin/hostapd-config" and get it all set up, I would use it. If I have to manually edit /etc/hostapd.conf and write 20 lines of code, then forget it.
RE: Setup scripts needed
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2005-07-06
http://www.iamsam.com/papers/Tracking_Wireless_Neighbors.htm
FakeAP could be handy to do this as well:
http://www.blackalchemy.to/project/fakeap/
Lots of other wireless sniffer/monitor apps for Linux:
http://tuxmobil.org/linux_wireless_sniffer.html
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"I still keep an OpenBSD partition on my hard drive, and play with it as time allows. Just a pity that I'm too dumb to get all these great security features to do actual work."
It's part of the OpenBSD philosophy that you DON'T HAVE TO setup all available security features because they already work OUT-OF-THE-BOX. In comparison to FreeBSD or Linux, this strategy requires less knowledge on the user side. You're right when you say that it's sometimes very time consuming to read the documentation of various daemons in order to configure them, but OpenBSD's default configurations are also "secure by default" and most of the time require little manual configuration work by the user.
