RELENG_7 and atheros ....

[Kevin Oberman]

> Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2007 13:03:32 -0600
> From: Eric Schuele <e.schuele at computer.org>
> 
> On 11/15/2007 23:35, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> >> Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2007 22:08:13 -0600
> >> From: Eric Schuele <e.schuele at computer.org>
> >> Sender: owner-freebsd-current at freebsd.org
> >>
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> I'm having some strangeness with respect to my atheros based card on
> >> releng_7.  This may not sound like much... but together they concern m> e.
> >>  I'm wondering if anyone has seen similar things.
> >>
> >>   1) I've seen two panics while trying to bring the interface up over
> >> the last few weeks.
> > 
> > I have not seen this.
> > 
> >>   2) I get disconnected every night from my wireless router at home.
> >> 99% of the time it happens after I've gone to bed.  Once or twice...
> >> while I was sitting in front of it.  It just disassociates?
> > 
> > Try 'ifconfig ath0 -bgscan'. Something causes my card to lose
> > association periodically when the background scan is in progress.
> 
> Are you saying try the above *after* I've been disconnected?  Or is it
> an attempt to reproduce the disconnect?

No. Try it as soon as your system comes up. It disables the regular
background scan for APs that, by default, happens every 5 minutes. Note
that I don't see my association go down on every scan, but turning this
off seems to prevent the disassociation from ever happening. I have
confirmation from at leat two others with the same Atheros chip-set that
this fixed their recurrent disconnects. (It certainly fixed mine.)

Note that this change will have a negative effect if you are roaming or
your environment changes in some way.

> >>   3) When I am at the office,  my card will *never* obtain an ip address
> >> from our DHCP server upon first booting.  I must *always* down the
> >> interface, kill dhclient, bring the interface up and start dhclient.
> > 
> > Are you running wpa_supplicant? Are you using WPA, 
> 
> Yes, see below on my original post.
> 
> > WEP or running open?
> > I see the card get "stuck" when scanning. It scans channels, but only
> > for WPA secured APs. When needing to associate with a WEP or open AP, it
> > never leaves WPA mode, so never associates.
> 
> Hmm... yes, I 've noticed it doing this.  Going around in circles
> through all the channels in WPA mode.  odd.  Any other work around other
> than bouncing the interface?

I have found that '/etc/rc.d/wpa_supplicant restart ath0' fixes it for
me. I added an alias to my .tcshrc file to save typing.

That said, I updated my sources last week and I don't recall seeing the
problem since then. Maybe it's fixed. I did see come fixes committed to
-current that might have been applicable, but I don't know if any have
been MFCed to 7.0 or if they will fix this.

I really need a bit more time to collect and analyze some debug data on
this so I can give Sam some good data to work with.
-- 
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
Key fingerprint:059B 2DDF 031C 9BA3 14A4  EADA 927D EBB3 987B 3751
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 224 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/attachments/20071116/0ae712f1/attachment-0001.pgp