Arch Linux

desertViking

Member

From: Arizona

Registered: 2005-10-30

Posts: 170

ath_pci works from live install, but not from boot (netcfg2 or CLI)

Hi,

Strange things happening on my old laptop, a T22 with an IBM wireless cardbus adapter.  This adapter is supported by madwifi.  It is detected correctly when I boot from the live CD.  I configured it with iwconfig and used this connection to do an FTP install.

I then installed netcfg,and created a wireless profile from the example, changing only my ESSID and KEY as appropriate.

In rc.conf, I've commented out everything except:

NETWORKS( wireless)

and added net-profiles to the DAEMON list.

When I execute netcfg2 wireless, it tries to start the wireless connection but it halts.

Checking the iwconfig, the essid and key are correct, but it is not associated.  RX invalid nwid counts up quickly and the lights on the PCI card blink for xmint and receive pretty much continuously, but not quickly.

iwconfig ath0 essid myessid key mykey open
dhcpcd

results in a variety of weird errors and timeouts.

Thoughts?

UPDATE: starting network from gnome-network-manager is OK.  Only starting with netcfg2 or CLI is a problem...

Last edited by desertViking (2008-04-14 19:17:15)

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"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is."

tigrmesh

IRC Op

From: Florida, US

Registered: 2007-12-11

Posts: 792

Re: ath_pci works from live install, but not from boot (netcfg2 or CLI)

Hi,
*snip*
starting network from gnome-network-manager is OK.  Only starting with netcfg2 or CLI is a problem...

Hi.

Congratulations on getting network-manager to work.  Usually it's the other way around:  many people struggle to get network-manager working, while being able to connect via netcfg2 or CLI.  What's the name of your profile?

desertViking

Member

From: Arizona

Registered: 2005-10-30

Posts: 170

Re: ath_pci works from live install, but not from boot (netcfg2 or CLI)

Profile name is 01-wireless.  I have another one for 02-ethernet.  Simple kludge, but I like the wireless connection to come up first if I use the menu option on NETWORKS...  In my example above, I think I said wireless only, but it was only an example.

Thanks for the reply.  I'm sort of scrtaching my head, but I do have a working PC at the moment.  It's just not as clean as I would like.

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"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is."

desertViking

Member

From: Arizona

Registered: 2005-10-30

Posts: 170

Re: ath_pci works from live install, but not from boot (netcfg2 or CLI)

I found this message in the madwifi trouble tickets (I was seeing a lot of RX invalid NWID messages on this pc):
http://madwifi.org/ticket/1081
While it appears that Arch is at 9.3, I thought there might be problems with the madwifi drivers in this case.  Even with NetworkManager, performance was slower than I would have expected, and I could not see all of the wireless networks typically within range.
So, I removed them and used ndiswrapper instead.  Performance using NetworkManager improved, no invalid NWID messages and better performance, and I was able to successfully connect using CLI and netcfg2.
Strange, but true. 
Still confused as to why the live CD, which used the madwifi drivers didn't seem to exhibit any problems.  Although, to be fair, because it seemed to be working, I did not check iwconfig to see if things were behaving well.

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"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is."