Re: Issues with ath9k dropping connectivity - now no connectivity

[Norman Henderson <norm.audrey@gmail.com>]

Felix, in case anyone else has the same problem, your suggestion was
correct. I installed the 2.6.32 kernel backport for Debian Lenny (from
backports.org), built the latest daily "bleeding edge" compat-wireless
from wireless.kernel.org and built the development version of hostapd
(0.7.2). It wasn't as scary as I expected; the only significant
complication was with nl80211 when building hostapd, and this was
resolved by removing CONFIG_DRIVER_NL80211=y from hostapd.config.

Everything seems to be completely stable, including with eth0 and wlan0 bridged.

Thanks for your help!

- Norm

> On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 21:21, Felix Fietkau <nbd@openwrt.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 2010-07-10 9:40 PM, Norman Henderson wrote:
>> > Thanks very much Felix for the quick comment. I'll follow up on it
>> > over the next few days as I get time to move to "bleeding edge"
>> > (something I've sworn from my youth to never do...).
>> >
>> > However I guess I was more concerned about the regression from an
>> > environment that worked (with disconnections) to one that doesn't
>> > connect at all - is that just the luck of the draw or did I do
>> > something stupid? (more precisely, what was it that I did stupid,
>> > because that's inevitably true :~
>> No idea if it was a configuration error or if it broke somewhere. To be
>> honest, I stopped caring about AP mode in old kernels completely,
>> because of the large number of known bugs that are fixed in newer versions.
>>
>> - Felix
>
> ==================================
> Original message:
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm a bit new to all of this - here's the short story. I would
> appreciate any help available!
>
> I was building a WAP using a PC Engines ALIX board (AMD Geode LX800),
> DNMA92 wireless card (Atheros 92xx) and Voyage Linux (based on Debian
> Lenny, 2.6.30 kernel with hostapd 0.6.9 and libnl1.1). It was all
> working but, the wireless card would drop connectivity for no apparent
> reason after an undetermined time (minutes to hours). Stations (Win or
> cellphone) would no longer see it at all, as if it was no longer
> transmitting.
>
> The Voyage maintainer advised that ath9k isn't that stable at 2.6.30.
> So, I upgraded the kernel to 2.6.32 using the Debian Lenny backport. I
> then installed the "stable" compat-wireless, 2.6.32.16.
>
> Hostapd appears to start OK. However, the wireless SSID is only
> visible to the Windows clients for a short time - seconds/minutes -
> and they aren't able to connect. There were no errors in the hostapd
> startup and it does its key rotations periodically. All that's logged
> from hostapd -dd during the actual time that the Win clients can see
> it and are trying to connect is:
> 1278785975.350851: STA 00:13:02:be:7b:f9 sent probe request for broadcast SSID
> 1278785975.353034: MGMT (TX callback) ACK
> 1278785975.353073: mgmt::proberesp cb
> (repeated a few times)
>
> The Win7 station used to connect automatically but now doesn't and
> when I click "connect" it fails and shortly thereafter the SSID
> disappears from the list.
>
> Nothing in /var/log. iw phy phy0 info and iw dev wlan0 info appear to
> report sensible info as does iwconfig.
>
> During boot I do get messages about "VIA Padlock Hash Engine not detected" and
> modprobe: FATAL: Error inserting padlock_sha
> (/lib/modules/2.6.32-bpo.5-
> 686/kern...): No such device
> From googling it's not clear to me at least whether this is relevant.
>
> Suggestions? What further diagnostics could I do?
>
> Thanks,
> Norm Henderson