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    Atheros AR9280 "ath0: stuck beacon; resetting (bmiss count 4)" hangs later.

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    • X
      xbipin
      last edited by

      thanks for the info, i was just checking out the fit pc3 pro, seems good, does the HDD go in the case as well and how well does it perform and what about heat dissipation?

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      • N
        Nadrek
        last edited by

        I've got the Fit-PC3 Pro with the 4 Intel NIC + 4 USB FACE card (pfSense 2.0.2 sees those but not the Realtec onboard, 2.1 sees all five).

        On the bottom, in the middle there is a large aluminum plate held in by one screw that slots in securely; the hard drive is screwed directly into the aluminum plate, and the whole hard drive+plate drops down and then slides in to both close the plate and seat the SATA connectors, like many laptops but without the flimsy plastic.

        Heat dissipation is good… which means it gets fairly hot, uncomfortable to the touch on the top of the fins with extended high CPU.  A small fan (I sometimes use a small fan powered by the machine's own USB) cools it until it's quite cool, even at low power.

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        • X
          xbipin
          last edited by

          ill probably wait for the alix upgrade which should be out before mid 2013 with 4 realtek gigabit nics, 2-4gb ddr3 ram, amd 1ghz dual core processor, msata slot, sd slot with same form factor as current alix coz they dont heat up much plus no moving parts so its completely silent

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          • P
            phil.davis
            last edited by

            I started a Hardware thread to ask about the new Alix - http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,59555.0.html - @xbipin or others, if you know more about upcoming Alix hardware, please post there, thanks.

            As the Greek philosopher Isosceles used to say, "There are 3 sides to every triangle."
            If I helped you, then help someone else - buy someone a gift from the INF catalog http://secure.inf.org/gifts/usd/

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            • N
              Nadrek
              last edited by

              xbipin, you are the entity!  I ran 32000 byte pings from a client to the pfSense box (WPEA-111N) for 23 hours without any hangs, with a total of 2.5GB of data transferred.

              At this point, I've got OpenVPN (Camellia-256-CBC) running over the Wifi, and the LAN link to a VM on the wifi host with a gigabit USB2 hardwired network card into one of the Intel ports, and have been running iPerf

              
iperf -c <wifiopenvpn_ip>--tradeoff --len 8K -w 128K -P 1 -t 30 -i 5 -m</wifiopenvpn_ip>

              repeatedly for at least 10 minutes, with speeds varying from ~10Mbits/sec to ~30Mbits/sec.  The Fit-PC3 Pro is averaging about 1% CPU per Mbit transfer on CAMELLIA-256-CBC with RSA-SHA512 authentication - I'm sure AES-128-CBC and SHA256 authentication would be lower, even without AES-NI.

              During the 23 hour ping test, I did see the occasisonal burst of "ath0: stuck beacon; resetting (bmiss count 8)", but they cleared up on their own, and it just kept responding even after the occassional timeout (again, on 32000 byte packets).

              Thank you very much for your help - if there are any references on precisely what those tuning values are, I'd appreciate it, as I'd like to know how to find the "best" values.

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              • X
                xbipin
                last edited by

                i guess its just some interval timing stuff coz stuck beacon usually happens in noisy environments and/or DMA timings, busy bus etc where the card thinks it cant transmit

                probably u should send me that card  :)

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                • N
                  Nadrek
                  last edited by

                  Status update:
                  The System Tunables settings of

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

                  have corrected the pfSense wifi interface hangs.

                  http://forums.freebsd.org/archive/index.php/t-14616.html indicates longcal 30 is a default.
                  http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2011-March/061772.html indicates that the AR9280's in particular were being worked on in the FreeBSD kernels.

                  The Sparklan WPEA-111N  is delivering some very strange asymmetric rates that I need to track down further, but it did transfer 2.5GB of data on the iPerf test before the client app running on a PC stalled out - no fault of pfSense.

                  The same iPerf test on the Ubiquiti SR-71e delivers an incredibly consistent 20Mbit/s in one direction and 22Mbit/s in the other direction, and did so for over 40GB of data transmitted each way.  Note that under the 20Mbit/s rate, with either Camellia or AES on the OpenVPN connection, the CPU usage was in the 27-40% range, averaging about 30%, and the temperature pfSense was reporting on the Dashboard was 62C with the little USB fan running, and up to 76C without, despite the ribbed case.

                  The Sparklan is still seeing the odd "ath0: stuck beacon; resetting (bmiss count 8)", though the Ubiquiti is not; I'm going to pull out my Bullet 5M and try the spectrum analyzer mode; in particular watching it when, say, the microwave starts.

                  All tests done on 802.11a, 5Ghz, with pfSense 2.1 snapshot "2.1-BETA1 (amd64) built on Wed Feb 27 16:09:04 EST 2013".

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                  • S
                    scott_ev
                    last edited by

                    @Nadrek:

                    Status update:
                    The System Tunables settings of

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

                    Can someone please explain what these tunables do?  What does higher or lower numbers represent/do in both settings?  I've tried these settings and still get stuck beacon errors so I tried setting bstuck=12 - no more stuck beacon errors but wifi connectivity still drops out periodically.

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                    • X
                      xbipin
                      last edited by

                      did u find a fix for this?

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                      • X
                        xbipin
                        last edited by

                        i noticed enabling WME also causes stuck beacon to happen more often, since i disabled, i didnt get any

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