(possibly) broken drivers (ral and rum)
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I'm guessing it probably is the same without bssid, since you reported this before it was added to the commands used (and probably only applies for hostap mode anyway). Removing that, you would pretty much have it reduced to the bare minimum commands to get it operational.
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The ral problem I reported earlier in this thread is also easily reproduced. The two commands:
ifconfig wlan create wlandev ral0 wlanmode hostap bssid
ifconfig wlan0 up ssid Bree
are sufficient to crash the pfSense system, again after a pause of no more than a few seconds after the second command completes.
The same two commands with hostap replaced by adhoc have a similar result.
When I issued the two commands
ifconfig wlan create wlandev ral0 bssid
ifconfig wlan0 up ssid Bree
the system successfully continued for some minutes until I forced a reboot.
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ral update:
I have further investigated the ral problem and found that ral wasn't interrupting, even when in infrastructure mode. Close inspection showed the PCI card wasn't seated evenly in the PCI socket; the edge closer to the back panel protruded a little more than the edge further from the back panel. So I evened out it and rebooted and the system did not crash on clicking Apply all changes in any of the three modes: ad-hoc, access point or Infrastructure.
However when the NIC was configured in Infrastructure mode it repeatedly reported "device timout" and my netbook saw no evidence of a signal corresponding to the ssid I had configured. I saw a problem report about this ( http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=kern/117655 ) but I thought the explanation was unconvincing. I'm using a 90W PicoPS and a 48W switch mode PS (12V @ 4A) so I suppose the surge current capability of this is a fair bit lower than that of a more standard computer power supply. I can get a pretty cheap card with a more recent ral chip (rt2561) so I might get that to try out.