More wi odd behavior

[Kevin Oberman]

This seems to be my week for wireless problems, but they are starting to
get really weird, now.

I was running with tcpdump monitoring the TCP stream between my laptop
her in Vancouver and my desktop system in California to try to figure
out why I was seeing performance problems. I suspect that the packet
capture triggered something as the problems were MUCH worse while I had
tcpdump running in promiscuous mode.

In any case, my stream locked up and I saw the following:
# ifconfig wi0
wi0: flags=8943<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,PROMISC,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        inet6 fe80::205:3cff:fe03:86b9%wi0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x3
        inet 142.231.19.178 netmask 0xfffffe00 broadcast 142.231.19.255
        ether 00:05:3c:03:86:b9
# wicontrol
wicontrol: SIOCGWAVELAN: Operation not supported by device
# dhclient wi0
ifconfig: ioctl (SIOCAIFADDR): Operation not supported by device
wi0: not found
exiting.

????

I unloaded if_wi and reloaded it and restarted dhclient and everything
was fine. My ssh connections even survived.

Any idea what the heck is happening here?
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634