Re: MA111 problems at boot

Hi,

I am another of the many people who seem to be having this problem.

I am running Fedora FC3 kernel 2.6.11 with MA111 usb device, but I have been having the same problem with previous versions. I leave the MA111 attached all the time. At boot - initializing hardware - the light comes on and off again. At - Bringing up interface wlan0 - I get SIOCSIFFLAGS: No such device. 

Other people comment that there is a problem with hotplug, and that wlan.agent gets called from various places. It is possible that part of the problem I am having is that I am using shared key WEP security, and that access to a wireless access point without security may be easier.

Rather than try to understand what is going on in detail, I have taken advantage of the fact that starting the interface works possibly 5% of the time. I have called the script shown below from /etc/rc.d/rc.local. It is simply a loop which continually tries to restart the interface. I do get an automatically bootable system, although it takes time because I have added a 10 second sleep interval between tries. The sleep interval may or may not be necessary. Sometimes it starts after a couple of cycles and sometimes many more tries. The script only works with WEP security because it detects when the interface has been configured for Encryption (An additional line containing the word "Security" appears in the output of iwconfig).

I do not use the suggestion of adding "options prism2_usb prism2_doreset=1" in /etc/modprobe.conf which just contains "alias wlan0 prism2_usb".
 
Here is the script:

#!/bin/sh
# the following seems to be necessary to clear the SIOCSIFFLAGS problem mentioned above
wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_ifstate ifstate=enable
i=0
while
        [ $i -le 20 ]
do
        i=`expr $i + 1`
        iwconfig 2>/dev/null | egrep Security > /root/myscripts/mytestout
        if
        [ `cat /root/myscripts/mytestout | wc -l` -ge 1 ]
        then
            echo "interface is running"
            echo $i >> /root/myscripts/wlan0_boot_count
            exit 0
        else
            echo $i "starting wlan0......."
            # next is required otherwise wlan start has no effect
            rmmod prism2_usb
            /etc/rc.d/init.d/wlan start
            sleep 10
        fi
done
echo "failure after 20 tries">> /root/myscripts/wlan0_boot_count
exit 1

I hope this helps.

Peter Ison


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Hank VanZile 
  To: [email protected] 
  Sent: Friday, May 13, 2005 5:10 AM
  Subject: [lwlan-user] MA111 problems at boot


  Hi everyone,

  I've asked for help with this before, but didn't receive much response.  Does anyone have any ideas?

  I am using a Netgear MA111 USB adapter with Fedora Core 2 running kernel 2.6.8-1.521.  I installed linux-wlan-ng 0.2.1 pre26 and it works just fine, with the exception of, what I gather is, a pretty common problem.

  If the adapter is plugged in when I boot (or restart) the computer, it is not recognized.  I found the FAQ that suggests I add "options prism2_usb prism2_doreset=1" to modules.conf.  Since I have a 2.6x kernel, I popped that into my modprobe.conf file, but it doesn't seem to have done anything.
  I added it at the very beginning of the file, before either of these commands:

  alias usb-controller uhci-hcd
  alias wlan0 prism2_usb

  Does that make a difference?
  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

  Here are the parts of my dmesg output that refer to USB and WLAN.  I have attached the full dmesg output as a text file, in case I missed anything.

  usbcore: registered new driver usbfs
  usbcore: registered new driver hub

  usbcore: registered new driver hiddev
  usbcore: registered new driver usbhid
  drivers/usb/input/hid-core.c: v2.0:USB HID core driver

  USB Universal Host Controller Interface driver v2.2

  uhci_hcd 0000:00:07.2: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1
  hub 1-0:1.0: USB hub found
  hub 1-0:1.0: 2 ports detected
  usb 1-2: new full speed USB device using address 2
  hub 1-2:1.0: USB hub found
  hub 1-2:1.0: 4 ports detected
  usb 1-2.1: new full speed USB device using address 3

  usb 1-2.1: device not accepting address 3, error -71
  usb 1-2.1: new full speed USB device using address 4
  usb 1-2.1: device not accepting address 4, error -71

  prism2usb_init: prism2_usb.o: 0.2.1-pre26 Loaded
  prism2usb_init: dev_info is: prism2_usb
  usbcore: registered new driver prism2_usb
  usbcore: deregistering driver prism2_usb
  prism2_usb.o: 0.2.1-pre26 Unloaded
  p80211.o: 0.2.1-pre26 Unloaded
  ip_tables: (C) 2000-2002 Netfilter core team
  ip_tables: (C) 2000-2002 Netfilter core team
  prism2usb_init: prism2_usb.o: 0.2.1-pre26 Loaded
  prism2usb_init: dev_info is: prism2_usb
  usbcore: registered new driver prism2_usb

  Thanks,
  Hank

_______________________________________________
Linux-wlan-user mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.linux-wlan.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-wlan-user