Cisco 350 MPI firmware problems: a new datapoint

Jake Khuon khuon at NEEBU.Net
Fri Mar 12 14:08:18 PST 2004


I've been battling with the 350MPI support problem for quite some time now. 
I'm running firmware version 5.00.01 on the card and am on 5.2-CURRENT.  I
cvsup and build world on an almost daily basis.  My an0 interface oftentimes
stops becoming accessable.  The kernel still recognises it as being there
but it refuses to associate with an AP and any attempt to send to it results
in a "no buffer space available".  Sometimes suspending and resuming will
bring it back but it will then go away again after an indeterminate amount
of time.  Actually it doesn't seem to be time based at all.  It looks like
the culprit is heavy outbound network traffic.  If I am solely using the
wired ethernet, the wireless interface remains stable but once I switch
over, all bets are off.

At first I thought it was the an driver not fully supporting the MPI card. 
However, I recently had the "opportunity" to spend some (more) time in
Windows XP.  I am running Windows XP with the older 2.22 NDIS drivers that
support the older firmware version of my card.  I never had to spend much
time previously with the laptop booted into Windows so I never saw it but I
have recently noticed a similar behaviour in Windows whereby the card will
freeze up under heavy egress traffic and cause Windows to lock up shortly
afterwards so I think the main fault may be attributed to the firmware.  The
latest firmware and NDIS drivers under Windows XP do not exhibit this
problem.  However, as most of us know, the an driver only supports the older
firmware for now.


--
/*===================[ Jake Khuon <khuon at NEEBU.Net> ]======================+
 | Packet Plumber, Network Engineers     /| / [~ [~ |) | | --------------- |
 | for Effective Bandwidth Utilisation  / |/  [_ [_ |) |_| N E T W O R K S |
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