D-Link DWL-G520 Problems

thezfunk

Here's the deal. pfsense 1.2.3RC1

I have Via Epia CL2500 with a pico 90W PSU. I had a Linksys WMP54G (ral0) and it was a horrible failure. So, with the golden promises of naked hot chicks, I bought a Atheros based card to get wireless to work. Not only were there not naked hot chicks but there wasn't even intertube connectivity to download pictures of naked hot chicks. I am dangerously short of naked hot chicks at this point.

The card I bought is a D-Link DWL-G520 revB (ath0). The link seems to go up and down over and over. In the server logs I get the error, "kernel: ath0: stuck beacon; resetting". I tried searching and found instances of the problem with FreeBSD without any solutions that I could determine.

Also this:
Jul 11 01:08:04 last message repeated 935 times
Jul 11 00:58:04 last message repeated 959 times
Jul 11 00:48:03 last message repeated 945 times
Jul 11 00:38:02 last message repeated 954 times
Jul 11 00:28:01 last message repeated 906 times
Jul 11 00:19:41 hostapd: ath0: STA 00:23:6c:03:96:18 IEEE 802.11: deassociated
Jul 11 00:19:41 hostapd: ath0: STA 00:23:6c:03:96:18 IEEE 802.11: deauthenticated due to local deauth request
Jul 11 00:19:37 hostapd: ath0: STA 00:23:6c:03:96:18 IEEE 802.11: associated

Basically, with lots of time and money spent I still have no working Wifi on pfsense. The best and most reliable solution that has worked for me has been buying a hardware access point and putting it on the LAN. Sad state of affairs.

One last thing…assume for a rare moment that I get this working. D-Link says the card supports WPA but nothing about WPA2. Is all that jazz software based or hardware based. Will this card work with WPA2?

thezfunk

I might have figured it out. According to this thread (http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=1226)on the FreeBSD forums that card (DWL-G520) is based on the AR5212 chipset which according to the compatibility page (http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.0R/hardware.html#WLAN) it isn't supported because, "The ath(4) driver supports all Atheros Cardbus or PCI cards, except those that are based on the AR5005VL chipset."

Then I looked at the page to find that ALL of the 802.11g cards are based on a chipset that isn't supported! W…T...F. So my question to the community is this.

What 802.11g Atheros (or otherwise) cards just work in pfsense?! I have so far tried two that were suppose to but don't.

wallabybob

My TP_LINK TL-WN651G works fine and has for over 16 months. pfSense startup reports Atheros 5212 chipset. I use WPA2 and have three Windows Vista laptops in the house that routinely use the wireless link.

What systems are trying to use the wireless link? Have you checked the wireless parameters on the clients are compatible with those in pfSense? Have you tried using another wireless channel? (Maybe you have a lot of wireless interference.)

thezfunk

@wallabybob:

My TP_LINK TL-WN651G works fine and has for over 16 months. pfSense startup reports Atheros 5212 chipset. I use WPA2 and have three Windows Vista laptops in the house that routinely use the wireless link.

What systems are trying to use the wireless link? Have you checked the wireless parameters on the clients are compatible with those in pfSense? Have you tried using another wireless channel? (Maybe you have a lot of wireless interference.)

Wireless parameters all match. iPhone and laptop. I have not tried a different channel primarily because the iPhone will only operate on channel 1. I can give that a shot. There really aren't any other wireless networks in the area.

thezfunk

I seemed to have figured it out. Well, I should say I don't know why it wasn't working before but I found some settings that seem to work.

This card has a turbo mode and it seems to work best when set to turbo in pfsense. Turbo mode requires channel 6 so it is set to channel 6. I found some people using FreeBSD who had problems using WEP with this card so I am using WPA2. You shouldn't use WEP anyway but whatever. I had it off for several days but in the firewall. I enabled it one night with these settings and it has worked ever since. The range was pathetic so I bought a new 7db antenna which solved my range problems. I spent some time testing with different angles and placements too to find the best position.

All in all it seems to work now. I guess Atheros based cards can work. I am keep hearing on the forums that they are simply plug and play. Not the case in my experience. Lots of online research and monkeying around to find what works.