F12 Wireless Network intermittently Dropped: AR9285 card / ath9k module

[Richard Shaw]

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 7:39 PM, Lonni J Friedman <netllama at gmail.com> wrote:
> No, I didn't try the bleeding edge kernel because that seems like a
> random shot in the dark.  I've found that this problem occurs
> completely at random.  Sometimes multiple times/hour, and once I went
> 8 days without any issues.  With those odds, I don't see how I could
> ever confidently claim that the problem was fixed.  If someone wanted
> to give me some means of generating useful debug output that would
> help to isolate the problem, I'd be willing to try that, but just
> blindly trying a newer kernel seems like a great way to waste my time.

I have a similar problem on my wife's Acer laptop which uses the ath9k
driver. I've done two things. One, created an account on the kernel
bugzilla so I can hopefully help get the problem fixed (as well as
subscribe to the bugs so I get notified when there are updates). And
two, downloaded/compiled/installed the latest compat-wireless[1] which
lets you use the latest wireless drivers with your existing kernel.

I only have subjective results thus far but the bleeding wireless
drivers did SEEM to make an improvement. Before I could not get a
complete backup of /home from my BackupPC server over wireless. After
installing the latest drivers I still got one disassociation while
scp'ing a 25MB file but the backup finally was successful.

Richard

[1] http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Download