WLAN Atheros connection problems

davros123

Had a similar issue with the beacon…just stopped working after a few hours and no reboot, tweak or change would bring it back to working.

I get the feeling most just give up on wireless and fall back to an AP.

I am sorry to say that is what i did...seems there is no love for wireless and pfsense.

zash1958

This would be a big fail.

In 2.14. it works flawlessly for months!

So I think this must be a problem in bridging and/or the IP stack ?

neptunus

@zash1958:

This would be a big fail.

In 2.14. it works flawlessly for months!

So I think this must be a problem in bridging and/or the IP stack ?

In 2.14. it NEVER worked flawlessly for me. Mmmm this is a shame, I think it is more of a wifi support issue in BSD then in pfsense.

mglaum

You guys are aware that there is a long story behind this? E.g. http://madwifi-project.org/wiki/StuckBeacon ?

I'm running 2.1.3 and I get these same stuck beacons. I don't think this is a problem confined to 2.2.

So how does zash1958 know that his EIRP is greatly reduced? Via the RSSI on a receiving node?

jimp

Typically that's because of a busy channel and the card and driver get confused.

Try adding system tunables for

hw.ath.bstuck = 8
hw.ath.longcal = 30

If that doesn't help, bump bstuck up to 12 or 16.

mglaum

Ya, maybe I should test that. Where do I find out more about those tunables?

zash1958

It seems that this is NOT the problem.

The card itself works. The problem is that the first minutes after connecting a client to the WLAN the IP packets do NOT run…... Only if You start a ping or an nslookup the connection starts immediately.

Thus may be a BIG problem with the bridging or the networking stack itself. ICMP works form first second. IP not.

mglaum

Since I added these tunables, I've not been getting stuck beacon log messages. I never really had observable problems with my wifi anyway.

hw.ath.bstuck = 8
hw.ath.longcal = 30

zash1958

This tunables may cover the "beaconing" problem.

But the "5-minutes-no-ip-on-wlan-connect" problem is not solved with this

shaqan

Try i386 build instead of AMD64. Had the issue, it went away after I switched arch. Tunables on AMD64 only gave some extra time before "beacon stuck" spam stroke again.