[arch-general] Last couple of updates Knocked my Wireless -- OUT (atheros/madwifi/ath_pci)

[David C. Rankin]

On Tuesday 22 September 2009 09:56:49 am David C. Rankin wrote:
>         I know the wmaster0/wlan0 combination was weird, but it seemed to
>  work fine.  I'll change the config to wifi0/ath0 under the old kernel,
>  confirm performance under the setup and then I'll reinstall the new kernel
>  and try to build madwifi from svn as you have suggested. Let me know if
>  you have any other thoughts in the mean time. Thanks.
> 

Danny, all,

	I have upgraded back to the current kernel (2.6.31-1) and madwifi 
(0.9.4.4096-1) and I have managed to get wifi working at 100%, but according 
to Tom, my setup would never work -- it does. But I'm still fighting the 
problem with my clock getting adjusted backwards by the amount of the tzoffset 
on each shutdown/reboot (see: New kernel/updates - Is the timezone information 
messed up for dual-boot configs) [posted earlier today]

	I don't know if this is the right way to configure the madwifi driver or not, 
but from all the README's, etc., this is the way it has to work. If you see a 
better way, please let me know. I'll try to explain the current config in 
hopes that somebody can see a better way to configure the driver.

	With madwifi 0.9.4.4096-1, my box can use the ath5k driver just fine. So I 
have setup rc.conf as follows:

MOD_AUTOLOAD="yes"
MODULES=(ath5k vboxdrv vboxnetflt)
HOSTNAME="alchemy"
eth0="dhcp"
INTERFACES=(!eth0)
gateway="default gw 192.168.6.13"
ROUTES=(!gateway)
NETWORKS=(!main dcrwpa.conf)

	When ath5k is loaded, the following wireless extensions are created by 
default:

[13:49 alchemy:/etc] # iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

wmaster0  no wireless extensions.

wlan0     IEEE 802.11bg  ESSID:"skyline"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.437 GHz  Access Point: 00:23:69:5C:FD:B6
          Bit Rate=54 Mb/s   Tx-Power=20 dBm
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:*** [3]
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=49/70  Signal level=-61 dBm  Noise level=-103 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

(obviously wlan0 isn't configured when it is first created)

	Since the ath5k driver defaults to the wmaster0 placeholder for the wlan0 
extension in the Arch setup, the network.d script has to reference wlan0 
because the network scripts evidently call 'iwlist scan' to find available 
networks and the only way that will work is if wlan0 is used, anything else 
results in an error. So the network.d script that I derived from the examples 
is:

[13:51 alchemy:/etc] # cat network.d/dcrwpa.conf
CONNECTION="wireless"
INTERFACE=wlan0
SCAN="yes"
SECURITY="wpa"
ESSID="skyline"
KEY="myunsecretkey"
IP="dhcp"
TIMEOUT=20

	This works at boot time to activate the wireless network automatically as it 
should. However it does it under wlan0 instead of ath0. (strange, yes).

	After the interface is up, the only remaining items to be done are to 
associate the interface with the access point:

iwconfig wlan0 essid "skyline"

	Then the rest is up to wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd.

	Now if there is a better way to do this, please let me know. From what I can 
tell, since ath5k creates the wmaster0/wlan0 extensions by default, I don't 
know what else you would be able to do.

	However, the initial problem about the slowness with the connection seems to 
have been corrected by manually adjusting the time and setting the hwclock 
after it had been set backwards by 5 hours by something in the shutdown or 
init process:

13:42 alchemy:~/archlinux/config/wireless> rsync -uav --progress 
archangel:~/dsj.wav .
receiving incremental file list
dsj.wav
    23578844 100%    2.99MB/s    0:00:07 (xfer#1, to-check=0/1)

sent 30 bytes  received 23581816 bytes  2774334.82 bytes/sec
total size is 23578844  speedup is 1.00

	I'm still trying to figure the time issue out. Again, if you can see a better 
way to do this, then please let me know. Thanks.

-- 
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
Rankin Law Firm, PLLC
510 Ochiltree Street
Nacogdoches, Texas 75961
Telephone: (936) 715-9333
Facsimile: (936) 715-9339
www.rankinlawfirm.com