F12 Wireless Network intermittently Dropped: AR9285 card / ath9k module

[Lonni J Friedman]

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 6:24 PM, Richard Shaw <hobbes1069 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

FWIW, the problem has never been that severe for me.  Every time the
connection has died (disassociated) for me, its either been when the
system has been sitting idle (such as overnight), or immediately when
I attempt to transmit alot of data (streaming media).  Usually once
its working ok, it remains ok until it sits idle for some extended
period of time.

If I knew that I could trigger the problem simply by transmitting a
few hundred MB of data, then I'd gladly give the latest
compat-wireless a try.


-- 
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L. Friedman                                    netllama at gmail.com
LlamaLand                       https://netllama.linux-sxs.org