I've wasted most of my Saturday trying to get wireless to work with the latest kernel on my 64-bit Sid box. I have an Atheros ar5001x card, and I've been using an older 2.6.22 kernel with madwifi drivers for the past two years. I'm rather conservative in upgrading my kernel, precisely because of issues like I've had today, but I found need for 2.6.30-1.
As madwifi is gone from Debian testing and unstable, I decided to switch to the ath5K drivers included in the latest kernel. I followed the instructions here: http://wiki.debian.org/ath5k, with the exception that I use wicd to manage my network, and as such I had no need to amend my interfaces file. After rebooting and a little fiddling, the ath5k driver came up, and wicd found my wireless network. I can't however connect to it. It tries to connect, usually timing out while getting a valid authentication, but sometimes it manages to validate the WEP key and attempts to obtain an IP address but then times out doing that. I've tried every suggestion that I could find through Google and this list, and none of them worked. The driver is loading correctly, and my card is being detected. It just won't connect. I even switched back to the madwifi drivers at one point, installing from source, and it still wouldn't connect to the router. (That plus the signal strength was horrible in madwifi.) The card was working properly this morning, so it's doubtful the problem is in the hardware. I've also tried switching to WAP and turning off security altogether, but that made no difference. One odd thing that occurs is that udev keeps renaming wlan0 to ath0. The ath5k instructions state to change all references of ath0 to wlan0, but that results in "Device not found" errors. The output from iwconfig is: ingrid:/home/autumn# iwconfig lo no wireless extensions. eth1 no wireless extensions. eth3 no wireless extensions. wmaster0 no wireless extensions. ath0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:"JohnWayne" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.417 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=27 dBm Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:off Power Management:off Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0 Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0 pan0 no wireless extensions. dmesg shows this every time I attempt to connect to the wireless router: [ 2707.953219] ath0: direct probe to AP 00:18:4d:24:09:8f try 1 [ 2708.152034] ath0: direct probe to AP 00:18:4d:24:09:8f try 2 [ 2708.352026] ath0: direct probe to AP 00:18:4d:24:09:8f try 3 [ 2708.552034] ath0: direct probe to AP 00:18:4d:24:09:8f timed out [ 2713.502701] ath5k phy0: noise floor calibration timeout (2417MHz) [ 2714.666870] ath5k phy0: noise floor calibration timeout (2417MHz) [ 2714.683331] ath0: direct probe to AP 00:18:4d:24:09:8f try 1 [ 2715.114532] ath5k phy0: noise floor calibration timeout (2417MHz) [ 2715.120196] ath0: direct probe to AP 00:18:4d:24:09:8f try 2 [ 2715.320031] ath0: direct probe to AP 00:18:4d:24:09:8f try 3 [ 2715.520029] ath0: direct probe to AP 00:18:4d:24:09:8f timed out ifconfig gives this result: ingrid:/home/autumn# ifconfig ath0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:18:02:42:ac:d1 UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:50:bf:3a:2f:47 inet addr:192.168.1.4 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::250:bfff:fe3a:2f47/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:1470 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:1940 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:588211 (574.4 KiB) TX bytes:416006 (406.2 KiB) Interrupt:19 Base address:0x6000 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:146 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:146 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:12328 (12.0 KiB) TX bytes:12328 (12.0 KiB) wmaster0 Link encap:UNSPEC HWaddr 00-18-02-42-AC-D1-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00 UP RUNNING MTU:0 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) My etc/network/interfaces file has no references to ath0 due to my use of wicd. # The loopback network interface auto lo iface lo inet loopback # The primary network interface allow-hotplug eth1 iface eth1 inet dhcp I've tried uninstalling wicd and configuring by hand, but it gave no different results either. I also installed the 2.6.26 kernel from unstable and tried the official Debian madwifi packages with it. Still nothing. I've reached the end of what I know to do. Using a wired connection is not a solution, as the computer and the router are on opposite sides of the house. Any suggestions on what to try? Thanks, Autumn -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
