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jchillerup

Member

From: Denmark

Registered: 2011-08-10

Posts: 19

I get kicked off wireless networks when my card switches STA

Hi!

I live in a building with many access points broadcasting the same SSID. Every time (or at least very often when) my computer roams to another access point, the connection drops. In XFCE the connection seems active still, and Chromium seems oblivious to the fact that the connection is actually dropped (so my requests time out, instead of Chromium just realizing that the connection is down as usual and throwing an error immediately). This makes me think that it might be a driver bug.

Right now I can't reproduce it, but what should I look for? iwconfig lists some "Tx excessive retries" -- maybe they are part of the reason?

wlan0     IEEE 802.11abgn  ESSID:"egmont"  
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.462 GHz  Access Point: C4:10:8A:53:CE:39   
          Bit Rate=13 Mb/s   Tx-Power=15 dBm   
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=39/70  Signal level=-71 dBm  
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:10314  Invalid misc:3903   Missed beacon:0

EDIT: Now it happened, and something strange happened; These "Tx excessive retries" were reset. Maybe they are bound to the AP, and since I'm on a new AP and haven't made any traffic yet, they might be 0.  The iwconfig post-crash looks like this:

wlan0     IEEE 802.11abgn  ESSID:"egmont"  
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:5.5 GHz  Access Point: C4:10:8A:53:CE:3D   
          Bit Rate=6 Mb/s   Tx-Power=15 dBm   
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=42/70  Signal level=-68 dBm  
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

In order to resolve this problem, I have to "RF Kill" the card, and enable it again. dmesg had some suspicious lines:

[ 4195.948487] wlan0: waiting for beacon from c4:10:8a:53:ce:3d
[ 4195.994961] wlan0: beacon received
[ 4195.995065] wlan0: associate with c4:10:8a:53:ce:3d (try 1)
[ 4195.996817] wlan0: RX ReassocResp from c4:10:8a:53:ce:3d (capab=0x411 status=0 aid=2)
[ 4195.996824] wlan0: associated
[ 4195.996831] wlan0: moving STA c4:10:8a:53:ce:3d to state 1
[ 4195.996837] wlan0: moving STA c4:10:8a:53:ce:3d to state 2
[ 4195.996842] wlan0: No basic rates in AssocResp. Using min supported rate instead.

... and ...

[ 4293.268920] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Command REPLY_RXON aborted: RF KILL Switch
[ 4293.268931] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Not sending command - RF KILL
[ 4293.268936] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Command REPLY_RXON aborted: RF KILL Switch
[ 4293.275908] cfg80211: Calling CRDA to update world regulatory domain
[ 4293.276396] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Command REPLY_RXON aborted: RF KILL Switch
[ 4293.346300] usb 4-2: USB disconnect, device number 7
[ 4298.169833] usb 2-4: USB disconnect, device number 8
[ 4298.174304] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: dma_pool_free buffer-128, ffff8800b9039000/b9039000 (bad dma)
[ 4298.174419] ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: dma_pool_free buffer-128, ffff8800b9038000/b9038000 (bad dma)
[ 4298.174472] cdc_ether 2-4:1.7: wwan0: unregister 'cdc_ether' usb-0000:00:1d.7-4, Mobile Broadband Network Device

Last edited by jchillerup (2012-05-31 11:18:15)