Recent fragility with if_wi, 802.11 adhoc/wep, and Tiger

[Johann Hugo]

On Tuesday 19 July 2005 11:21, Alex Dupre wrote:
> Robert Watson wrote:
> > I fairly regularly use 802.11 adhoc with WEP to communicate between my
> > 6.x/7.x FreeBSD notebook using if_wi, and my Apple PowerBook running Mac
> > OS X Tiger.  A few days ago, when I updated from a June to a July HEAD
> > revision, this became quite "fragile".
> > I was wondering if anyone else has seen this problem, though.
>
> I have a (not so) similar problem with my atheros based D-Link DWL-G650
> card with late CURRENTs. The problem is very strange: I can connect
> stablily to my neighbor's 11g wireless network (even if the signal is
> lower than my D-Link DI-624 AP) and I hardly can connect to my AP. When
> it happens, the connection goes down after few seconds (no carrier) and
> I cannot reconnect anymore. This used to work with older current (about
> a month ago). I though the AP was broken, but I have a 11b device (voip
> phone) that can connect without problems (yes, I tried to connect the
> card in 11b mode, w/ & w/o wep, but it's the same).
> Anyone seeing this?

I am also getting problems with my atheros cards. When the connection goes 
down I'm seeing a lot of "rx failed 'cuz of PHY err" and "CCK timing" errors.

lab3# athstats
8894 tx management frames
5 tx frames discarded prior to association
887 tx failed 'cuz too many retries
13077 long on-chip tx retries
7 tx frames with no ack marked
9969 rx failed 'cuz of bad CRC
138910 rx failed 'cuz of PHY err
    138888 CCK timing
    22 CCK restart
1 beacons transmitted
39 periodic calibrations
1180 rate control checks
25 rate control dropped xmit rate
rssi of last ack: 15
avg recv rssi: 44
1 switched default/rx antenna
Antenna profile:
[1] tx     7720 rx    29817
[2] tx      292 rx       37

With tcpdump -y IEEE802_11 I can see the packets, but without -y IEEE802_11 
there is nothing.

Johann Hugo