user experience with ural for Ralink RT2500-USB

Hi,


I was happy to see support for the Ralink chipset just added.

I bought an E-Tech wireless USB adaptor, with a Ralink 2500 chip to
try it out. (I plan to dismantle the thing and connect it directly
to a bi-quad antenne to get rid of the cable and connector loss I'm
currently seeing on my boat).

First experiences,
non-serious, just to mention it:

1. You have to "kld_load if_ural", but that's documented
2. "ifconfig ural0 station blabla" does not work:
      SIOCS80211: Invalid argument
3. "ural" must be added to devd.conf, if you want it to
   get recognized on plugging into a running system

A little serious:

  It did not work with dhclient, although it does work when configuring
  by hand. My dhclient.conf tries a number of accesspoints in succession.
  It turns out that "/sbin/dhclient-script" runs ifconfig
  twice in a row to set the media-configs:
   if [ x$reason = xMEDIUM ]; then
     eval "ifconfig $interface $medium"
     eval "ifconfig $interface inet -alias 0.0.0.0 $medium" >/dev/null 2>&1
     sleep 1
     exit_with_hooks 0
   fi
  The ural-driver seems not to like this, and commenting out one
  of the ifconfig's fixes the problem. Not sure though whether
  fixing /sbin/dhclient-script or the ural-driver is the best
  approach here.

More serious:
  
  With several accesspoints, 11g and 11b types, it works, but
  it will not associate with Apple Airports (the old flying
  soucer model, with a wavelan-pcmcia card in it).
  Debugging with net.wlan.debug, learns that beacons are coming in,
  and the wep-setting is OK:
   Apr 28 09:20:07 petje kernel: - 00:02:2d:2a:41:5e 00:02:2d:2a:41:5e   10   110 11M   ess   no! "Omval Airport"!
   Apr 28 09:20:07 petje kernel: - 00:0d:65:48:6d:08 00:0d:65:48:6d:08    6    10 11M   ess   no! 0x0000000000000000!
   Apr 28 09:20:07 petje kernel: + 00:02:2d:1f:57:41 00:02:2d:1f:57:41    9   110 11M   ess  wep  "NLnet Labs _at_ Matrix"
  (both "Omval Airport" and ""NLnet Labs _at_ Matrix" are airports, the
  former without wep, the latter with; with wepmode off, the former
  gets a + and the latter a minus). However, ural0 never gets a "probe"
  from the airports. I'll append some more logging info.

Regards,
-- ted

Some more logging of the failing association with airport and
a succesful one with a linksys:
 
 Apr 28 09:20:07 petje kernel: ural0: received beacon from 00:02:2d:1f:57:41 rssi 110
 Apr 28 09:20:07 petje kernel: [00:02:2d:1f:57:41] discard  unhandled information element, id 128, len 6
 Apr 28 09:20:07 petje kernel: [00:02:2d:1f:57:41] new beacon on chan 9 (bss chan 9) "NLnet Labs _at_ Matrix"
 Apr 28 09:20:07 petje kernel: [00:02:2d:1f:57:41] caps 0x11 bintval 100 erp 0x0
 Apr 28 09:20:07 petje kernel: ieee80211_setup_node 0xc1502c00<00:02:2d:1f:57:41> in scan table
 Apr 28 09:20:07 petje kernel: rx done
 Apr 28 09:20:07 petje kernel: ural0: received beacon from 00:02:2d:1f:57:41 rssi 110
 Apr 28 09:20:07 petje kernel: [00:02:2d:1f:57:41] discard  unhandled information element, id 128, len 6
 Apr 28 09:20:07 petje kernel: rx done
 Apr 28 09:20:07 petje kernel: ieee80211_cancel_scan: end active scan
 Apr 28 09:20:07 petje kernel: ural0: notify scan done
 Apr 28 09:20:07 petje kernel: macaddr          bssid         chan  rssi rate flag  wep  essid
 Apr 28 09:20:07 petje kernel: - 00:02:2d:2a:41:5e 00:02:2d:2a:41:5e   10   110 11M   ess   no! "Omval Airport"!
 Apr 28 09:20:07 petje kernel: - 00:0d:65:48:6d:08 00:0d:65:48:6d:08    6    10 11M   ess   no! 0x0000000000000000!
 Apr 28 09:20:07 petje kernel: + 00:02:2d:1f:57:41 00:02:2d:1f:57:41    9   110 11M   ess  wep  "NLnet Labs _at_ Matrix"
 Apr 28 09:20:07 petje kernel: _ieee80211_free_node 0xc1525000<00:02:2d:1f:57:41> in <gone> table
 Apr 28 09:20:07 petje kernel: _ieee80211_crypto_delkey: NONE keyix 65535 flags 0x3 rsc 0 tsc 0 len 0
 Apr 28 09:20:07 petje kernel: setting channel to 9, txpower to 27

With a linksys accesspoint it works:

 Apr 27 17:41:48 petje kernel: ieee80211_cancel_scan: end active scan
 Apr 27 17:41:48 petje kernel: ural0: notify scan done
 Apr 27 17:41:48 petje kernel: macaddr          bssid         chan  rssi rate flag  wep  essid
 Apr 27 17:41:48 petje kernel: + 00:0c:41:18:5f:b5 00:0c:41:18:5f:b5    8    10 11M   ess  wep  "Omval Linksys"
 Apr 27 17:41:48 petje kernel: - 00:12:17:60:87:95 00:12:17:60:87:95   11    10 54M   ess  wep  "wifihome"!
 Apr 27 17:41:48 petje kernel: _ieee80211_free_node 0xc14da400<00:06:f4:0a:7a:4e> in <gone> table
 Apr 27 17:41:48 petje kernel: _ieee80211_crypto_delkey: NONE keyix 65535 flags 0x3 rsc 0 tsc 0 len 0
 Apr 27 17:41:48 petje kernel: ieee80211_newstate: SCAN -> AUTH
 Apr 27 17:41:48 petje kernel: ieee80211_ref_node (ieee80211_send_mgmt:936) 0xc15bdc00<00:0c:41:18:5f:b5> refcnt 3
 Apr 27 17:41:48 petje kernel: [00:0c:41:18:5f:b5] send auth on channel 8
 Apr 27 17:41:48 petje kernel: ural0: received auth from 00:0c:41:18:5f:b5 rssi 10
 Apr 27 17:41:48 petje kernel: [00:0c:41:18:5f:b5] recv auth frame with algorithm 0 seq 2
 Apr 27 17:41:48 petje kernel: ieee80211_newstate: AUTH -> ASSOC
 Apr 27 17:41:48 petje kernel: ieee80211_ref_node (ieee80211_send_mgmt:936) 0xc15bdc00<00:0c:41:18:5f:b5> refcnt 3
 Apr 27 17:41:48 petje kernel: [00:0c:41:18:5f:b5] send assoc_req on channel 8
 Apr 27 17:41:48 petje kernel: ural0: received beacon from 00:0c:41:18:5f:b5 rssi 10
 Apr 27 17:41:48 petje kernel: ural0: received assoc_resp from 00:0c:41:18:5f:b5 rssi 10
 Apr 27 17:41:48 petje kernel: [00:0c:41:18:5f:b5] assoc success: long preamble, long slot time
 Apr 27 17:41:48 petje kernel: ieee80211_newstate: ASSOC -> RUN
 Apr 27 17:41:48 petje kernel: ural0: associated with 00:0c:41:18:5f:b5 ssid "Omval Linksys" channel 8 start 1Mb
 Apr 27 17:41:48 petje kernel: ural0: link state changed to UP
---
.