Arch Linux

tim

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2006-10-29

Posts: 98

wireless card problem after upgrade

Hi people. Firstly I'd just like to say Arch ROCKS! anyway ...

OK strange problem. Not expecting much, but if anyone can help then that would be great.
I recently installed Arch for the first time (7.2 with the 2.6.16 kernel etc). My wireless card was detected and configured no probs. I set up my wireless with wep and all the business. Everythinng was great. So then after a few days of getting to know Arch I decided it was time to get KDE. In order to get KDE to install I had to "pacman -Syu" first and then install KDE. No probs. All went smoothly. kernel updated to 2.6.18 etc.

HOWEVER. I now have this really wierd problem wherby SOMETIMES (e.g. 50% of the time) I can't connect to my AP. I've tried manually setting up the link on the command line one command at a time and everything is fine except now I get the following error if I try to set the mode to auto:

Error for wireless request "Set Mode" (8B06)
Set failed on device eth2 ; Operation not supported.

And more importantly if I try to set the channel I get:

Error for wireless request "Set Frequency" (8B04)
Set failed on device eth2 ; Device or resource busy.

I never had these problems before I did "pacman -Syu"

The man page for iwconfig says that in Managed mode, the AP sets the channel and sometimes the driver will refuse the setting of the frequency. This is the ONLY thing I can think of that could be going wrong but if it is I have no idea how to fix this?

Any ideas anyone?

tim

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2006-10-29

Posts: 98

Re: wireless card problem after upgrade

c'mon people. someone must be able to help me!!!! Anyone?!  :cry:

iphitus

Forum Fellow

From: Melbourne, Australia

Registered: 2004-10-09

Posts: 4,927

Re: wireless card problem after upgrade

be patient -- dont expect a response in an hour. we don't live on here, except maybe one or two people.

first, you dont need to set mode to auto, you need to set mode to 'managed'

and secondly, for most cards setting channel is unnecessary, so you can just avoid setting it.

try increasing the WIFI_WAIT to see if you get better reliability.

James

tim

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2006-10-29

Posts: 98

Re: wireless card problem after upgrade

Sorry, truely didnt mean to sound impatient or rude.

I'm not sure why you presumed I am specifically setting the mode to auto. I've tried all possible modes and yes what I need is to put the card into managed mode hence my little bit at the bottom of my post regarding what the man page says about managed mode, same goes for setting the channel. Originally I was only setting the essid and key parameters and not setting any of the many other paramters which I did simply to try and locate the problem, and as a result the only problems I have are in attempting to set the mode and or channel so I'm presuming this is where the problem is.

I will try and increase the wait time as you suggested.

Thanks

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: wireless card problem after upgrade

What driver does your card use? And do you have a wired NIC or any other network devices in your machine?

Also:

I'm not sure why you presumed I am specifically setting the mode to auto.

I get the following error if I try to set the mode to auto:

tim

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2006-10-29

Posts: 98

Re: wireless card problem after upgrade

ahem... well thats a pretty good reason I suppose  :oops:

driver is orinoco

tim

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2006-10-29

Posts: 98

Re: wireless card problem after upgrade

OK increasing the wait time dodnt work.

However, defining udev rules for network interfaces has so far fixed the problem. This is particularly weird since the etherent lan card is always on eth0 but wireless is sometimes eth1 and sometimes eth2, but i only have 1 wirelss card?

Anwyay for anyone who may per chance read this post and is interested in this udev 'trick' of statically naming network interfaces, see: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ude … Each_Boot)

Thanks for your help.

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: wireless card problem after upgrade

However, defining udev rules for network interfaces has so far fixed the problem.

Yes - that was going to be my next suggestion.

This is particularly weird since the etherent lan card is always on eth0 but wireless is sometimes eth1 and sometimes eth2, but i only have 1 wirelss card?

Something else on your system is being autodetected as a network card.  Have a look in dmesg for details.

iphitus

Forum Fellow

From: Melbourne, Australia

Registered: 2004-10-09

Posts: 4,927

Re: wireless card problem after upgrade

network cards take ethX, and if you have firewire, it will load the firewire networking module.

tim

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2006-10-29

Posts: 98

Re: wireless card problem after upgrade

  HA!

Thats hysterical. I never even knew this laptop HAD firewire. WOW. Thanks! This is for sure the funniest thing thats ever happened to me while attempting to fix a problem I had with linux. The firewire socket is non standard, it's really small and I just never saw it and never noticed it looking at dmesg.

Wow thanks again. Now don't have to use my crappy usb2 ports.

So I dont understand though why firewire will be loaded as a network module?

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: wireless card problem after upgrade

"Arch Linux - detects hardware you didn't even know you had."

Good story. Networking is possible over firewire, so udev, helpful as always, loads the module for you. If you don't want it, blacklist it.