Re: RELENG_7 and atheros ....

> Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2007 09:24:29 -0600
> From: Eric Schuele <e.schuele_at_computer.org>
> Sender: owner-freebsd-current_at_freebsd.org
> 
> On 11/15/2007 22:08, Eric Schuele wrote:
> 
> > 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 me.
> >  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.
> >   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?
> >   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.
> > 
> 
> As a follow up for the list...
> I rebuilt world and kernel on Nov 22nd.  Since this time I have not
> noticed the above mentioned issue #3.  I did not dig through any commit
> logs... but appears as though something changed to fix it.
> 
> Fwiw...
> Note that I did make a change to fix item #2 on the advice of another
> FreeBSD'er.  That change did not affect item #3.  I did still see item
> #3 occurring until I rebuilt on the 22nd.
> 
> Thanks to all.

I will also confirm the exact same experience. With more recent kernels I
no longer see problem #3. I just associate on boot.

I still need to disable background scanning to maintain stable
connections.  

If there is only a single AP available, I lose association on occasion,
usually about 10-15 times a day and re-establish the association in
under 10 seconds. It's only slightly annoying.

If there are multiple APs with the same SSID, things are much worse. The
network seems to die every 5 minutes and take long intervals to
re-associate, making the network pretty useless.

In either case, 'ifconfig ath0 -bgscan' makes things work, again, at
some cost to stability if I move around while online, but I don't tend
to do this.

Some day, when I have a bit of time, I will collect debug information on
this so that Sam or someone else who understands the code might be able
to track it down.
-- 
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
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