Need help! Prism2 wireless card stops working, floods terminal with errors
 

Hello again all. I've been having a very frusterating problem with the wireless card (D-Link DWL-500, a Prism2 card in a PCI adapter) in one of my workstations, which serves as a NAT gateway between two subnets. Sometimes, when it is put under load, it will just plain stop working, flooding dmesg and the terminal with this error:

eth1: Error -110 writing Tx descriptor to BAP

What I'm wondering is, what is causing this? It can be very frusterating at times to be SCP'ing a large file from my file server on the other subnet, only to have it stop dead right in the middle. Can the card just not handle the load I'm putting on it?

Some info about the system:

OS: Linux From Scratch
Kernel: 2.4.19
Network cards: Linksys EtherFast 4.0, D-Link DWL-500
Using the kernel's orinoco driver for the wireless card

Although I hate to admit this, you may want to switch to the linux-wlan.net drivers, which seem to handle these funkier prism2 implementations than the orinoco drivers set.

But before you do that, you may want to just try out the newest set of orinoco drivers as 2.4.19 shipped a few back, .11 I think. Here's the author's page:

http://www.ozlabs.org/people/dgibson/dldwd

The compile and install cleanly on an LFS with a simple make, make install, its pretty brilliant.

Cheers,

Finegan

Thanks. I'll try them out later and post with the results.

EDIT: It worked! I was finally able to transfer a 3 GB file over it. A little slow, but at least the connection didn't drop a few seconds into it. :)

I was having the same problem with my NetGear MA401RA wireless card. The orinoco .11 drivers didn't fix it. Upgraded to .13 and so far the problem appears to be fixed :)

Thanks!

Mike

Which one worked for you? the new orinoco drivers or wvlan drivers?
I am experiencing similar problems with the orinoco drivers that came with 2.4.19 and 2.4.21 kernels from Mandrake cooker.
My card is, however, a NetGear MA401RA.

You mean 2.4.19 and 2.4.20, 21 hasn't been released yet, although its at pre4 now!, but then there's a few rcs, and it really doesn't matter as all of it is orinoco v.11b, go straight to the source:

http://ozlabs.org/people/dgibson/dldwd/

and grab the .13 series, they compile and install usually with a simple make, make install. If you've patched up hermes.conf to accept for the MA401RA, then you'll have to do it again as this is going to overwrite that.

Cheers,

Finegan

Yes, you're correct Finegan. I am experimenting with 2.4.21pre4

I did not want to loose all the patches put in by Mandrake, so this is what I have done now (AND YES IT WORKS!!)
- My laptop is 'based' on Mandrake 9.0
- downloaded and installed kernel-source (from cooker) for 2.4.21pre4. This is needed to rebuild ver 0.13 of orinoco drivers (see below). I have the same kernel installed from rpm. This is applicable to any 'current' version of kernel.
- side note: /usr/src/linux will already have a .config file in it ie. this kernel source is preconfigured. You can either move this to a temporary location and then do the usual rebuild steps or install the same kernel from rpm. I rebuilt the modules because I wanted to fix a bug in the drivers/sound/trident.c file (which hung when trying to reset the ALi 5451 sound chip in my laptop). But that's another success story.
- Since you indicated that even this kernel used the older orinoco (ver 0.11) drivers, I also downloaded the ver 0.13 source and rebuilt with 'make and then make install'.
- rebooted and verified by checking 'dmesg' to ensure that ver 0.13 of orinoco driver did load.
- final litmus test: transfered the kernel source rpm (about 25M worth) from my laptop to my desktop via WIFI without any hickups!! I'm a happy camper now.
Thankx a bunch for the pointers and clarifications.

Cheers,
Thas