Re: Athros wireless stopped working

[Jim Ham <jimham@porcine.com>]

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Pavel Roskin wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-03-08 at 18:37 -0800, Jim Ham wrote:
>
>> What I have discovered is that if the ESSID is not active, iwconfig sets
>> it correctly and it sticks. If the ESSID is one that is locally present,
>> iwconfig seems to set it, but it almost immediately reverts to garbage.
>
> Either you have a memory corruption bug in your kernel, or you have some
> buggy userspace tool (it could be a misbehaving NetworkManager or wicd)
> that changes ESSID on the interface as soon as the driver reports
> association.  I haven't seen any similar reports.
Right on! All works in single user mode. On poking around I found that 
the Gnome client for NetworkManager was missing. Once I installed the 
client all started to work. So this is a Debian package management 
issue, along with perhaps a bug in NetworkManager or it's underlying 
utilities.

My distribution is Debian Testing (Squeeze). I'm not sure when 
NetworkManager showed up, but I'm betting that it was coincident with 
the wireless problem.

Thanks for the advice.


>
>> 	Kernel driver in use: ath5k
>
> ath5k is not an example of code quality, but I don't remember any memory
> corruption bugs in it fixed since 2.6.32.
>
> I suggest following steps:
>
> 1) Check for updates for your distribution, install updates, recheck.
>
> 2) Boot to the single user mode, make sure that wpa_supplicant and wicd
> are not running (kill them otherwise) and try setting up the connection
> manually.
>
> 3) Install the latest compat-wireless, recheck.
>
>
>
>
>
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