Thanks all for the very useful responses.
I believe this "Radio Loses WiFi Connection" issue to be so serious as to deserve major escalation. My 6 radios are very nearly unusable, most failing after just a few minutes. Of course, not everyone is experiencing this yet, but enough have so far and the numbers likely will just keep growing. The entire ecosystem is threatened if the radios fail in large number. I tried turning everything off except for one new simple wireless AP, the main router, and the pc running LMS, including phones, cameras, televisions, IOT devices, and Bluetooth devices. Still, the radios wifi deteriorated and eventually lost connectivity. This suggests RFI of some sort disrupting the system, or that 6 radios on one access point is too many. However, these radios have been around for years, but this disconnection issue started only earlier this year, and has gotten worse during the summer. The neighbors are not that close, and their wifi signals are at least 20-30 db lower. I haven't gotten out the (quite heavy) spectrum analyzer yet to look for interference, but it looks like that might be necessary. I shouldn't need an LNA to detect what is presumably a high level signal. I tried setting the debugging flags, to increase the driver verbosity, but these had no effect (because the ar6000.ko driver was build without debug support?). However, a debug build may be needed. Despite time spent, I have not made much or any progress with this issue, being impeded by lack of the AR6102 chip specs and the source code (no access to this site's private repository.) The closest public source so far is some AR6kSDK.build_sw.18 code and various versions of AR6kSDK.3.1, some of which is close to but not the same as the code referenced in the various patch files. The various open source decompilers produce dubious looking gibberish. To reiterate, I see three issues: the device is too easily disrupted, fails to report a connection loss, and the supplicant or other layer does not otherwise notice a lack of connectivity and initiate corrective action. An optimum response would be to address all three. I examined the serial console log file started after over a day of disconnection. In this session, the radio is connected to a simple bgn router/access point located very close to the 4 of the 6 radios used by the 'important' (no, not me) users. The rssi of this access point at the test radio is 25 db below another modern AP 10 feet away. The bgn AP is on channel 1, which somehow greatly improved its chances of being detected by the ar6000 scan, and presumably connectivity, although not enough. Connected to the office AP, the SB radio is more stable. However, its UE office mate, 30 feet away from the same AP, drops out anyway after a few minutes, so rssi is not the only factor. The 'wpa_cli scan_results' frequently show only 1 to 3 access points, that is, the three nearby access points are frequently not all shown even though the signal strengths are all good to excellent. Occasionally, a neighbor's AP shows up, even though its signal strength is 20 db less than the lowest house AP. Also, the connected AP sometimes doesn't show up in the scan, a clue. I then switched each radio to the strongest AP signal, on the three APs, but they still kept dropping out after a few minutes, except the UE in the basement, and the one with the serial cable connection, which last much longer. Out of frustration, I concocted a script to ping the gateway, and reset the wireless when connectivity is lost. I cannot yet predict from the statistics (e.g., when the errors skyrocket and/or the data rates decline) when connectivity will be lost. So it's the ping method, which is reactive and result in an outage of several seconds. This should be handled by the supplicant, or other service, but since that is not working, this is a start. Some good news: "wpa_cli reassociate" restores connectivity in many, but not all, cases. It works fairly quickly, when it works. And, my script has been running on my 6 radios, and they are still connected, a big success! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ POMdev's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=70558 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=111663 _______________________________________________ Radio mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/radio
