WEP wi0 config prob after 5.4 > 6.0 Upgrade

[Tom Pappano]

Tom Pappano wrote:

> Bakul Shah wrote:
>
>> This didn't work for me either when using WEP on iwi0.  After
>> a few experiments I gave up and used the following in
>> /etc/rc.conf which worked fine.
>>
>> ifconfig_iwi0="ssid SOME_SSID nwkey 0x123456789a DHCP"
>>  
>>
> Thank you very much!
> I need to test further to be sure the link will stay up indefinitely, but
> for now it seems to work fine.
>
> Thanks again,
> TP

After further testing on my two notebooks (Dell CPx and Dell CPi), the CPx
seems to behave OK- the connection stays up regardless of whether there
is traffic.  The CPi, however, will drop it's connection after a few minutes
of being idle.  Dhclient then must be killed and restarted.  When the
connection drops, ifconfig will still show the card "associated", but 
without
an IP address.  My workaround for the moment is simply keeping ssh
open between CPi and another machine on my network doing a dummy
job such as displaying "top".  (CPi is required to be accessible 24-7)

Is there somplace in the system configurations where a connection timeout
period is specified, or is this just peculiar behaviour?  FWIW, it is 
not the
wireless cards, swapping them did not change anything.

Reading some of the other postings to this list, I'm getting the 
impression that
there are simply problems with the wi driver, for instance refusing to work
with wpa_supplicant in wep mode, and if I want to use wpa_supplicant
features, I must just get a card compatible with ath.

Is this indeed the case?  I suppose I could retrograde CPi back to 5.4,
but that just seems wrong 8-)

Thanks,
TP