Re: RELENG_7 and atheros ....

On 11/16/2007 13:41, Kevin Oberman wrote:
>> 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. 

Oh, I see.  Would it be sufficient to place it in my rc.conf:
   ifconfig_ath0="WPA DHCP -bgscan"

> 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.

I do no roaming.

> 
>>>>   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.


-- 
Regards,
Eric