You're right, that was my problem.

I get the same error you mentioned if I use dhclient to try to get an IP
address after authenticating (must not forget to wait a few seconds
after "iwconfig eth2 rate 11M essid nothing" for association to complete!).

*However* (this deserves a new paragraph) if I set my IP address
manually I don't get the bcm43xx driver output about DMA (except for
"DMA initialized"), and it works fine.

Here is the diff-style difference in output (from dmesg) between
"dhclient eth2" (marked -) and a regular "ifconfig eth2 <ip> netmask
<nm>" (marked +).

 bcm43xx: Radio turned off
-bcm43xx: DMA 0x0200 (RX) max used slots: 1/64
-bcm43xx: DMA 0x0260 (TX) max used slots: 0/512
-bcm43xx: DMA 0x0240 (TX) max used slots: 0/512
-bcm43xx: DMA 0x0220 (TX) max used slots: 2/512
-bcm43xx: DMA 0x0200 (TX) max used slots: 0/512
+bcm43xx: PHY connected
 bcm43xx: Radio turned on
 bcm43xx: Chip initialized
 bcm43xx: DMA initialized
 bcm43xx: 80211 cores initialized
 bcm43xx: Keys cleared

That bit of info looks like it could be pretty useful!

It's also worth nothing that I _must_ call ifconfig up (optionally with
IP address) _before_ iwconfig. I have tested this thoroughly and this
_must_ be done. Furthermore users must wait for a beacon before calling
iwconfig. The easiest way to make sure this is the case is to run
`iwlist eth2 scan` a few times until the "Last beacon" value wraps,
indicating another beacon has been received. This wasn't tested with a
packet sniffer, simply that the beacon delta on my Airport Express base
station seems to be 6 seconds, and if I don't wait at all between
calling ifconfig up and iwconfig, the association fails.

I should also mention that i get duplicate ping replies (from the same
host), but I consider this a very minor bug for the moment and you're
probably already aware of it.

So in conclusion I'm guessing that there was recently an update to
dhclient that changed the way it deals with the interface, presumably
taking it down and up again before requesting an address, but not
bringing it back up exactly the way it was. I'm not sure why the DMA
messages only come up with dhclient, someone else will have to answer that.

Hope this helps :)

-Ted

Tim Cooijmans wrote:
> On Monday 13 February 2006 22:45, Ted Percival wrote:
>>Running iwconfig shows that there is a wireless interface, but running
>>iwlist eth2 scan produces "Interface doesn't support scanning : No such
>>device".
> I get this error when I forgot to ``ifconfig eth1 up'' prior to scanning.  
> Perhaps that's your problem?

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