On Thu, Jan 29, 2026 at 02:25:32PM +0100, Jan wrote: > Hi, > > i've used a qotom 8x lan fanless mini computer as my openbsd homerouter a > while ago, but exchanged it for some other hardware. > As my homerouter it did not had a need for a wifi card (using Ubiquiti APs) > so i ordered at that time without one. > > A few years later i'm still using it to fiddle around with some stuff and > occasionally the need for a wifi-card arises. > > The card should work well with modern wifi-networks as a client and should > be able to setup its own network using hostap mode. (Hostap must not be > fast, its only meant for a few hours testing stuff with one or two clients.) > > The Mainboard offers a M.2 slot keyed "e" for this purpose. > > As its mainly for some fiddling i would really appreciate if someone could > recommend such a card that is not too expensive and easily available on the > european market, ordering ali express or so would also be okay. > > Best Regards > > Jan
Overall, I think you will have a much better time with an external AP. There are athn(4) USB devices (AR9287) which work in client and hostap mode. They are slow with our driver because the driver still lacks support for 11n Tx aggregation. Adding support for this is a non-trivial task. What's cool about USB athn though is that the firmware we use is open source. In theory, anyone could fix anything in the firmware and driver. Unfortunately we have never, ever, received outside contributions to the driver or firmware. The only thing which changed is that people have stopped randomly complaining about the use of closed-source firmware. It seems these people are not actually making use of their freedom to fix things. If you want to do some lighter wifi driver hacking, you could try to hunt down one of these: https://wikidevi.wi-cat.ru/Dell_Wireless_1820A_(DW1820A) This card works with bwfm(4). There are small bugs which make hostap mode almost unusable. If you can manage to fix those bugs then this card should work quite well. The main issue I see is that channel selection is broken. The firmware just picks whatever channel it wants, e.g. even if 11ac mode is forced it might end up sitting on a channel in the 2GHz band and not work. So whether the hostap actually works after 'ifconfig bwfm0 up' is up to pure luck. There ought to be a way to force the firmware to use a particular channel. Even in a working mode/channel configuration I could never get clients to connect reliably when I tried to use this device as an AP. Some WPA handshake issues were fixed by mbuhl@ not long ago for a different use case (client mode) so this issue might now be fixed in hostap mode, too. I could test and review diffs for this device. But I don't have sufficient spare cycles nor a need to find and repair these bugs myself.
