Ath picking random channels
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Ah so if you backup and then restore your config.xml then it will stay on the correct channel?
What snapshot are you running? It sounds like maybe a file permission problem.
Could be worth reinstalling if you haven't tried that already and you haven't made any complex alterations.Steve
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thing is, it happened with the last snapshot i had, too, several months earlier, so i can't imagine upgrading to a newer snapshot will fix it. but it's not immediately obvious how to get the snapshot date from the cli, and at the moment i can't access the gui.
i could wipe and reinstall. but that's when this started; the previous (before the wipe) worked fine.
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Hmm, OK I agree it's unlikely to help then. :-
For future reference:[2.0-RC2][root@pfsense.fire.box]/root(1): uname -a FreeBSD pfsense.fire.box 8.1-RELEASE-p3 FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE-p3 #0: Fri May 13 23:16:51 EDT 2011 sullrich@FreeBSD_8.0_pfSense_2.0-snaps.pfsense.org:/usr/obj.pfSense/usr/pfSensesrc/src/sys/pfSense_wrap.8.i386 i386Steve
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mine was from may 16, by the uname method, which i ha considered but wasn't certain of the veracity of.
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Ah so if you backup and then restore your config.xml then it will stay on the correct channel?
oh, i missed this. i don't even need to restore. i can just go to the gui, make no change, "apply" and reloading the config that's already there will fix it.
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Yet at boot time, when it presumably reads and applies that same config, it's coming up on a random channel.
Are there any errors in the logs like it's failing to set the channel? Perhaps the wifi hardware is still initialising at that point and can't be set. :-\Steve
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well, i'd expect it to not have its SSID right either, in that case. but everything is right including the WEP key. just, and only, not the channel.
the log shows that ath0 is the first interface loaded on the system, before either ethernet is. it is probed 29 seconds before the log shows:
Jun 12 22:49:35 rtr check_reload_status: Reloading filter -
This is now pure speculation….
The ath driver supports many hardware configurations. Some are better supported than others. The ath driver provides an interface to setup the hardware that offers all the options available however because of hardware support some options may not be fully functional. For example there is an option to alter the regulatory domain of the radio but (as of 2006!) the code was not there for the 5212.Perhaps, since changing the channel is an actual hardware change, it is not able to set the channel correctly but does configure the ssid and security. You'd hope it would through up an error. You'd also expect other people to be having a problem. :-\
Steve
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thing is, this ath hardware worked fine with every previous snapshot until i reinstalled in may. so unless upstream broke it, that seems unlikely.
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thing is, this ath hardware worked fine with every previous snapshot until i reinstalled in may. so unless upstream broke it, that seems unlikely.
Nothing upstream has changed in ath since a year ago (RELENG_8_1 hasn't changed), and nothing in our wireless code has changed in months. But intermittent issues are the norm for some people with wireless for unknown reasons.
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i don't suspect the wireless hardware; i suspect the config being written to it is wrong. i guess i need to modify the scripts to log what config is actually set to confirm that.
