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#1 2009-02-19 18:11:37

sunriis
Member
Registered: 2007-09-22
Posts: 17

connection drops with arch64 and atheros wireless

Hi, I've just installed arch64 on my desktop. I have a dlink dwa-556 wireless adapter, with atheros chipset. The card is seen correctly and has been configured. I started a kdemod install with pacman, went on for about an hour, and then it hung, the wireless connection dropped... I tried to start it up again, but only a reboot could help... now I started pacman again and after some minutes bang! connection dropped again...

this is what iwconfig says

wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:CUT
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.432 GHz Access Point: Not Associated
Tx-Power27dBm
[cut]
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
[rest is all 0]

iwlist says my router has a quality of 30-40/100 and a signal level of around -76dBm

any help?

edit: typo on title

Last edited by sunriis (2009-02-19 18:45:04)

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#2 2009-02-19 23:33:04

celticmusicguy
Member
From: Zuni, VA, USA
Registered: 2008-07-24
Posts: 24

Re: connection drops with arch64 and atheros wireless

I think I may be experiencing something similar. I'm also running Arch64 and have the exact same adapter (DWA-556) and every once in a while my wireless connection drops. It only happens once every few days or so, but whenever it happens on my system it seems to cause anything Xorg-related (mouse, keyboard, video) to respond slowly. If I move the mouse around it doesn't move smoothly - it kind of jerks and jumps around.

Whenever the connection drops like this, I see the something like the following in /var/log/messages.log:

Feb 16 17:07:26 blacktower dhcpcd[19326]: ath0: carrier lost

The first couple of times this happened to me, I had to reboot to get the connection going again. I did find another way to get the connection working, though. What I did was unload the modules related to the wireless adapter, reload them, and then reconnect to the network. I wrote a quick shell script to do this for me, which looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
sudo rmmod ath_pci ath_rate_sample ath_hal
sudo modprobe ath_pci
sudo modprobe ath_hal
sudo netcfg -d home
sudo netcfg home

I'm using the madwifi driver right now and as you can see, I use netcfg to connect to my wireless network here. I've tried the ath5k driver but I seem to have the same issue with that. I haven't really found a solution to this yet, but the workaround of removing the modules, reloading them, and then reconnecting has worked well enough so far. If I dig up anything else helpful on this, I'll be glad to post it here.


Solutions nearly always come from the direction you least expect, which means there's no point trying to look in that direction because it won't be coming from there.
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#3 2009-02-20 08:53:56

sunriis
Member
Registered: 2007-09-22
Posts: 17

Re: connection drops with arch64 and atheros wireless

Hi, thanks for your answer!
I'll try to replicate your method and see if we are having the same problem.
Will check back here soon

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