madwifi wireless NIC drivers quit after kernel upgrade

m_a_b · 08-12-2004, 05:15 PM

I have an IBM T40p with the atheros based wireless card. I installed Mandrake 10 a few weeks ago and configured the MADwifi drivers which were working wonderfully. Today, I upgraded my kernel from 2.6.3-7 to 2.6.3-15 and now I cannot get the madwifi drivers to work. I reinstalled the drivers using cvs and it is just not working. If I use iwconfig, it can't find the ESSID (it is being temporarily broadcast). I also set the ssid and it shows 0 signal. I rebooted back to 2.6.3-7 and it is working fine. Anyone have this problem or know where to start looking for answers?

finegan · 08-13-2004, 03:52 AM

Just checking, you recompiled against the new kernel, got the new driver to load, have a device ath0, but it won't take iwconfig commands? Or iwconfig doesn't see anything there at all?

Also... this is an oddity with atheros cards, you need to bring the device up before iwconfig commands will stick. I don't know why this would have been different with a previous version of the kernel.

So, after:

ifconfig ath0 up

iwconfig commands should stick.

Cheers,

Finegan

m_a_b · 08-13-2004, 12:34 PM

yeah, all the modules load and I see my wireless light come on. But when I try to get the connection configured, it can't detect anything. Here is what I am doing:

Code:

$ su
Password:
# modprobe wlan
# modprobe ath_pci
# modprobe ath_hal
# ifconfig ath0 up
# iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

ath0      IEEE 802.11  ESSID:""
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.447GHz  Access Point: FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF
          Bit Rate:1Mb/s   Tx-Power:50 dBm   Sensitivity=0/3
          Retry:off   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:0/94  Signal level:-95 dBm  Noise level:-95 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

eth0      no wireless extensions.

#

m_a_b · 08-13-2004, 12:51 PM

by the way, when I try "ifup ath0", then the light goes off almost like the driver crashes or something. I can go through the rmmod series and reload the modules and the light comes back on.

finegan · 08-13-2004, 04:41 PM

Mandrake might have just added some kernel patches that break the driver, which is what I'm guessing at this point, the driver isn't completely compliant yet, and a little clunky becuasue it was a NetBSD import that brought along a lot of other NetBSD kernel code to work... we'll see. Try, after those first four steps, hand assigning it an essid
# modprobe wlan
# modprobe ath_pci
# modprobe ath_hal
# ifconfig ath0 up

iwconfig ath0 essid nameofnetwork
iwconfig ath0 mode managed (just to kick it in the pants again)

Cheers,

Finegan

m_a_b · 08-16-2004, 11:35 AM

yeah, I tried those too and it doesn't help. I'm guessing that I will just have to wait until a newer version of MADwifi is released. Until then I can still use my old kernel. Thanks for the help.