[Wireless] Can't connect to wlan

[Mel]

On Tuesday 11 March 2008 23:24:20 Andrew Thompson wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 08:04:42AM +1030, Benjamin Close wrote:
> > Mel wrote:
> >> On Tuesday 11 March 2008 08:53:09 Benjamin Close wrote:
> >>> Mel,
> >>>     Do the recent patches by Andrew make a difference?
> >>>
> >>> http://people.freebsd.org/~thompsa/wpi_head.diff
> >>> http://people.freebsd.org/~thompsa/wpi_releng7.diff
> >>
> >> They aren't committed (yet)?
> >> # ident /boot/kernel/if_wpi.ko /usr/src/sys/dev/wpi/*.c
> >> /boot/kernel/if_wpi.ko:
> >>      $FreeBSD: src/sys/dev/wpi/if_wpi.c,v 1.5.2.2 2008/02/02 06:49:57
> >> sam Exp $
> >>
> >> /usr/src/sys/dev/wpi/if_wpi.c:
> >>      $FreeBSD: src/sys/dev/wpi/if_wpi.c,v 1.5.2.2 2008/02/02 06:49:57
> >> sam Exp $
> >>
> >> I will try the RELENG_7 patch, possibly today.
> >
> > Andrew has recently committed these to RELENG_7, depending on how up to
> > date you are you may already have the patches in your tree.
>
> Only HEAD at the moment, RELENG_7 will be next week.
>
I'd hold off for the moment.

The connection stability degrades a whole lot.
Just to rule out any weather conditions, bad antennas and so on, I'm rebooting 
with kernel.old.

Both drivers suffer from the same problem and work-around cure:
If it gets disassociated from the AP, it will go into 'no carrier' mode and 
after random (long) time has passed, the interface will mark itself as down.

The cure is:
ifconfig wpi0 down (if it isn't already)
ifconfig wpi0 up list scan

Anything else won't work.
The new driver, will again warn about the timeouts for TX ring 1, 3 and 4 
before marking itself up.

Since the AP is a FreeBSD ath hostap running 6.3, I'm in pretty good shape to  
provide some more information.
Just tell me what to look for and how to obtain it, since I'm not too familiar 
with the IEEE802.11 layer.
-- 
Mel

Problem with today's modular software: they start with the modules
    and never get to the software part.