Slow upload on Android devices (edit: all devices)

Legion · Mar 15, 2014, 1:44 PM

My pfsense box has an Atheros AR9280 (AR5BXB92) card and a 20cm external antenna for an internal wifi interface. The dhcp is pfsense's built in server.

This device is a new Nexus 10 that's only been used on my pfsense network. I used to use a Nexus 7 that had been on a bunch of networks and clearing all cache data worked for about 5 minutes at a time.

And the problem manifests itself on other devices. Windows phone and some Apple things too.

I'll try clearing the android caches again though.

stephenw10 · Mar 15, 2014, 4:50 PM

Since you're using a card in ap mode the first check the system log and wireless log.

Steve

Legion · Mar 16, 2014, 1:15 AM

When it happens, the only significant thing in the firewall logs is significant numbers of TCP:PA entries.

The wireless logs look like this:

although to be honest I never look at them and haven't while connections are timing out. I will next time.

The system logs don't indicate anything unusual.

stephenw10 · Mar 17, 2014, 1:26 AM

Are those all the same wireless device? All those entries within the same second?
At the very least you may want to increase the re-keying interval. I have Key Rotation at 3600 and Master Key Regeneration at 7200, though I originally set that because earlier pfSense versions did not separate the wireless logs and it was spamming the system log. It didn't actually affect wifi performance at all.
In my logs I see, for example, this when a device first comes out of standby and connects:

Mar 16 15:21:41	hostapd: ath0_wlan0: STA 10:bf:48:**:**:** WPA: pairwise key handshake completed (RSN)
Mar 16 15:21:41	hostapd: ath0_wlan0: STA 10:bf:48:**:**:** RADIUS: starting accounting session 52BEED1F-0000035D
Mar 16 15:21:41	hostapd: ath0_wlan0: STA 10:bf:48:**:**:** IEEE 802.1X: authorizing port
Mar 16 15:21:41	hostapd: ath0_wlan0: STA 10:bf:48:**:**:** WPA: received EAPOL-Key frame (4/4 Pairwise)
Mar 16 15:21:41	hostapd: ath0_wlan0: STA 10:bf:48:**:**:** WPA: sending 3/4 msg of 4-Way Handshake
Mar 16 15:21:41	hostapd: ath0_wlan0: STA 10:bf:48:**:**:** WPA: received EAPOL-Key frame (2/4 Pairwise)
Mar 16 15:21:41	hostapd: ath0_wlan0: STA 10:bf:48:**:**:** WPA: sending 1/4 msg of 4-Way Handshake
Mar 16 15:21:41	hostapd: ath0_wlan0: STA 10:bf:48:**:**:** IEEE 802.1X: unauthorizing port
Mar 16 15:21:41	hostapd: ath0_wlan0: STA 10:bf:48:**:**:** WPA: start authentication
Mar 16 15:21:41	hostapd: ath0_wlan0: STA 10:bf:48:**:**:** WPA: event 1 notification
Mar 16 15:21:41	hostapd: ath0_wlan0: STA 10:bf:48:**:**:** IEEE 802.11: associated

Then nothing until it times out sometime later, usually having gone back into standby. The only other thing that appears is the WPA rekeying at 3600s (1h) intervals.

Your logs show a lot of handshake failing.

Steve

Legion · Mar 17, 2014, 12:51 AM

That would have been several devices.

I changed the Key Rotation and Master Key Regeneration this morning. I got similar handshake messages to you, once per device, after I looked after changing the key values.

But still it's slow. Like dialup slow or slower for the initial connection. And e.g. it's even slow to connect to pfSense GUI, to the point of timing out frequently. Just viewing system log pages and firewall aliases, not doing any config changes etc. My pfSense is via https, but not on port 443.

Sometimes it's better, like last night it behaved like a "normal" broadband connection should. And then this morning, timing out and slow connections but reasonable, not great download speeds once a connection is made.

I had to leave but will continue to investigate when it goes bad.

stephenw10 · Mar 17, 2014, 1:26 AM

You have good signal strength? Multiple antennas? Did you set the antenna connector numbers correctly?

Steve

Legion · Mar 17, 2014, 1:33 AM

Single TP-Link ANT2408C antenna. It's a big one. Good signal strength, devices mostly used in the same room as the antenna. I will check the connector numbers but like I say, signal strength is good and the problem persists.

stephenw10 · Mar 17, 2014, 2:11 AM

Ah, well definitely check the antenna selection then. I belive the default setting is to use one connector for Tx and the other for Rx. If you have only the Tx antenna connected you may well see great signal strength at the wireless device end but almost nothing being received back. Not sure how that would affect usage. It usually ramps down the connection speed until it sees consistent traffic but if it's seing a huge signal coming in perhaps it keeps trying to move back to a faster rate.

I only have one antenna and setting the Tx and Rx to use the correct connector (and diversity disabled) gave a huge improvement.

Steve

Legion · Mar 17, 2014, 1:31 PM

Maybe that's it- I thought it was a choice of 1 antenna connected to either jack or 2 if you wanted a 1x1 vs. 2x2 and the Atheros card would auto-config.

So I should connect a second cable and antenna? Easily doable for about $30. I avoided a second cable because it would mean drilling holes in my case, which is short on space anyway. No big deal though.

The antenna is giving me about 46-53dBm on channel 1 (both tx and rx) and 60dBm on channel 2 according to a wifi analyser app.

Legion · Mar 17, 2014, 1:32 PM

Diversity is gone from 2.1? I couldn't find it.

stephenw10 · Mar 17, 2014, 3:47 PM

I have an older Atheros wifi card but it's there in the settings for 2.1 on my home box.

Steve

![wifi settings.jpg](/public/imported_attachments/1/wifi settings.jpg)
![wifi settings.jpg_thumb](/public/imported_attachments/1/wifi settings.jpg_thumb)

Legion · Mar 17, 2014, 10:35 PM

Hmm, it's not there in my GUI. 2.1-RELEASE amd64 build.

stephenw10 · Mar 17, 2014, 10:46 PM

Hmm, interesting. I'm running 32bit Nano but I wouldn't expect that to make any odds. Perhaps your card doesn't support that setting so the screen doesn't show it. As long as you have tx and rx set the same I can't imagine it makes much difference. Clearly from your test it's important to choose the correct antenna.

Steve

Legion · Mar 17, 2014, 11:02 PM

One thing I found interesting - despite WEP being disabled, the android wifi analyser app that I installed detects and reports my regular WPA2 network but also detects an unnamed WEP network from the same MAC. I wonder why/how that is being broadcast.

I also wonder what the point is of checking the hide SSSID option when all these wifi analyser tools can see it anyway.

stephenw10 · Mar 18, 2014, 12:13 AM

Do you have the sysctls:

[2.1-RELEASE][root@pfsense.fire.box]/root(3): sysctl -a|grep antenna
dev.ath.0.txantenna: 1
dev.ath.0.rxantenna: 1
[2.1-RELEASE][root@pfsense.fire.box]/root(4): sysctl -a | grep diver
dev.ath.0.diversity: 0

Steve

Legion · Mar 18, 2014, 12:25 AM

I guess that means I need to change my rx antenna. I presume that the 0-offset sysctl numbers map to the 1-offset pfSense GUI …

In case it differs between configs (like the missing 'Diversity' setting), my pfSense antenna options for both tx and rx are:

Default
Auto
#1
#2

Legion · Mar 18, 2014, 12:31 AM

Quick google pointed me to this. A skim read indicates that I should look further into why my pfSense gui values differ from the sysctl values before I go setting things. There are also other values I have that differ from some of the values in that thread, so I will look into those too.

Legion · Mar 18, 2014, 5:00 AM

I had a look at man ath4 debugging and it pointed me towards an installed pfSense tool athstats. My output is:

I'm not sure what I should expect, but it seems like an awfully high rate of failures for various statistics.

Legion · Mar 18, 2014, 6:41 AM

This page might offer some suggestions. I'm wondering why as I mentioned earlier, the wifi sniffer app I installed finds an anonymous WEP access point broadcasting from my wifi card. I have WEP disabled in pfSense. I'm using channel 9. No other networks nearby are close. I think 6 and 12 are the closest channels and they are in the next houses. But the network rx graphs show an overlay of my named WPA2 network on channel 9 with the anonymous WEP network on the same channel, essentially mirroring each others' signal strengths. How can I diagnose/find/see/disable this network from pfSense? There is nothing shown by ifconfig. My config.xml files show tags but nothing between.

Here's the output of the wifi sniffer:

The red is my WPA2 network, the blue is the anonymous WEP network the sniffer sees.

Legion · Mar 18, 2014, 7:53 AM

I installed four other wifi analyser/sniffer apps. All but one detected the hidden WEP network.

I rebooted my pfSense box, hoping there would be some interface to the AR9280 in the bios where I could disable WEP but nothing.

As I said, there is nothing in pfSense's config.xml.

I wish all the wifi sniffers were wrong, but it would be a convenient explanation to my lost and delayed traffic. As you can see from the graph (and all the other graphs from the other tools) the WEP network signal strength is consistently stronger than my WPA2 network so it makes sense that WEP could be interfering.