i'm not sure which thread is the right one, but….i have lots of wireless issues that smell like this.

I'm using the latest build from last week (i have to check the version); before i went away for the weekend i spend a very fraught evening trying to sort everything out. I have three laptops at home, 2 IBMs and 1 Dell, 1 IBM runs Vista, the others all run XP.
The Vista Box and the Dell box could both get onto the net through WLAN, with WPA2. The other XP IBM didn't get a DNS server, which meant that a server I could use didn't any more.

The Vista box also couldn't get onto the net when i got home last night, though the Dell then suffered the same problem as the IBM had before, i.e. connection but no DNS. Through the cable everything is fine.

I will check what the status is tonight, but this is really annoying. I don't want to have to go back to IpCop, but I need a functional firewall :(

Did I miss a really good howto on the rules I must set up? Is there something silly i must check? (the encryption should be fine)....

thanks

Bret

Ok i've been playing around and i noticed some strange things:
The problem only occurs when the card is in client mode. Never (so far) when in AP mode.
When the problem occurs rebooting pfSense helps nothing. The problem exists right after bootup.
Rebooting the AP helps. For a while…

No, it does not work when you have a bridged lan to wlan, unless you use AP mode.

@shadow:

I picked up a cheap refurb ath5212 (3com 3CRDAG675) and swapped it in for my WG311; Rebooted and things were back up in 11g mode. Switching to 11a mode and applying makes the box appear radio-silent (it's up from the console and I can talk to the wired nets); Switching back to 11g and it's fine.

Right now it has 1.2 beta 2; I assume nothing will change in 1.2; Am I likely to be happier if I got back to something earlier, or am I just sad?

Answer: "auto" channel defaults to channel 34. When I force to channel 36, all is well.

FAQ: Do bridge wireless to wired interface if nothing is connected to the wired interface. The bridge will be down if one of the interfaces are down.

Thank You that's what I needed to know  8)

A quick check on the supported hardware page suggests that that chipset isn't supported.  You're probably best getting hold of a supported card (Intel generally comes highly recommended, but if you're only pushing a few Mb/s then you'll probably be fine with anything).

@lsf:

But the best way to AMP a signal is allways by adding a suitable antenna, by suitable I mean a antenna that gives you the gain you need With the narrowest radiation pattern you can live with.

I absolutely second that!

For the rest of the post I stick to what I said and do not open Pandora's box.

On a side note I found a receiver booster which only boosts from the antenna down the cable. Together with a raised output power from the card this can make sense as well. But I have no experience with this unit!

Use diagnostics>edit file from the webgui. It will set the filesystem rw and ro again on save (I guess you are running the embedded version).

You can …

Have two subnet for LAN and WLAN, i have choose this solution ...

With WPA2 and 802.1x on AP ...

okay thanks that is what i needed to know  ;D

I'm basically thinking of doing the same thing. What I have is a church and a house, and linking the DSL on the house to the church, ~300 meters away. I somehow doubt a regular box router is powerful enough, would it be? What we're planning on doing is using a SMA adapter on both of them, wire the coax outside, strip a few inches of shielding off the end and get them in line-of-sight. If I set up a normal box router as an AP at the house, can I turn a PFsense box with a wireless adapter & NIC to expand the LAN?

Never mind, I figured it out :-[.

Thanks

@dotdash:

There are many sysctl tweaks for the atheros hal. Search around in the wireless forum, there is quite a lot of discussion on the antenna diversity settings. If you are using a laptop mini-pci card, the firmware settings are to use both antennas, and the settings seem to have a way of changing back after you change them in the shell. There are some examples somewhere of adding the settings to the config.xml and setting a cron job to set it back.

I've already tried sysctl tweaks, but I had no luck with them. I've also added lines to sysctl.conf as described in a topic, but FreeBSD got a kernel panic at the next reboot forcing me to reinstall pfSense.
I've been using a PCI wifi-card with an Atheros 5212 chipset. Do these tweaks useful only for miniPCI cards?
I think I have to enable a sort of debugging, but I don't know how to do it since I am a Window$ user and I know few things about linux/unix.

1- Is it possibile to get more details from hostapd while it is running? It would help me to understand better the problem, because those annoying EAPOL warnings in the system logs are not so useful alone. What I have to edit/configure?

2- I've seen some fields in hostapd_ath0.conf, but they're replaced with default value. Can they be useful to enable a detailed debugging? Or is there another way?

I'm getting crazy because I've never debugged a wireless network problem. It is time to learn now… :'(

Thank you

MAC filtering can be enabled backend, this has been explained before (search forum and tickets).
WDS is not a standard, and is is not possible to enable a WDS type setup in pfsense(freebsd/driver limitation).

hi,
lets discuss the problem again. or does anybody solved it?

I upgraded to 1.2-BETA-1 and the configuration is WAN=wireless adapter, which gets the IP via DHCP from another AP. LAN=interl card and works fine.

If I reboot the pfsense box, then the WAN interface does not get an IP address. After a release/renew made by hand, it works fine.
What should or could I do, that pfsense gets an IP address after rebooting?
thx

Now I finally got an adapter yesterday, I used wireless for PFSense and am having the same problem. But the problem IS the PSP. I read a Sony forum where A LOT of people are having trouble with WPA on a wide variety of wireless routers. WEP does seem to work fine for me, but I won't enable it for security reasons