Re: WG311T wireless issue
On Sun, 2009-05-17 at 22:08 -0500, Steven Timm wrote: I see the same Warning: Driver for device wlan0 recommend version 21 on a pure Red Hat 5 update 3 machine, so whatever that warning is coming from, it's not from anything that Troy or the rest of SL is doing. I wonder if this is more a 64 bit environment issue than SL (or any other distribution). Besides the warning about driver mismatch, there is the misidentification of the device by both 'iwconfig' and 'lspci' with 64bit SL. There must be other examples of problems like this unique to 64 bit SL environments. Warning: Driver for device wlan0 recommend version 21 of Wireless Extension, but has been compiled with version 20, therefore some driver features may not be available... And my wireless is working mostly OK. 'mostly OK' is about how I would describe how my SL wireless works, too. But there are times when that is not good enough. For example, I connect via VPN to a remote site. On the 32bit system the connection is always immediate and reliable. On the 64bit SL system I can make a connection about 20% of the time. I suspect the negotiation between the VPN client and server is sensitive to the quality of the connection and cannot connect most of the time. That is my biggest problem. Tom R. Steve Timm On Sun, 17 May 2009, Troy Dawson wrote: Hi Tom, I am going to snip parts of your message out. Not that I don't think it is important, but more so I can concentrate on one thing. Tom Rosmond wrote: ... snip ... Warning: Driver for device wlan0 recommend version 21 of Wireless Extension, but has been compiled with version 20, therefore some driver features may not be available... wlan0 IEEE 802.11 ESSID:olympicMode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:1B:2F:E3:DF:4A Bit Rate=1 Mb/s Tx-Power=27 dBm Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr=2352 B Link Quality=51/100 Signal level=-62 dBm Noise level=-95 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0 ... snip ... 3. Although the versions of madwifi and wireless-tools in SL 5.3 should be more current than I installed on the 32 bit system, the warning about version mismatch for the 64 bit system suggests otherwise. This I don't understand. ... snip ... This has me concerned because this isn't the first time I've seen this message. I'm worried that perhaps the machine I am compiling these on has a wrong version of a package or two. Despite my efforts I am not the greatest wireless expert and it's possible I'm doing something wrong with the compiling. From what I can tell, my 32 bit and 64 bit compile area's are the same for wireless. But maybe I am looking at the wrong packages. Does anyone know where I should start looking to track down this error? Or even if there is anything I can do to fix it? Troy
Re: WG311T wireless issue
I see the same Warning: Driver for device wlan0 recommend version 21 on a pure Red Hat 5 update 3 machine, so whatever that warning is coming from, it's not from anything that Troy or the rest of SL is doing. Warning: Driver for device wlan0 recommend version 21 of Wireless Extension, but has been compiled with version 20, therefore some driver features may not be available... And my wireless is working mostly OK. Steve Timm On Sun, 17 May 2009, Troy Dawson wrote: Hi Tom, I am going to snip parts of your message out. Not that I don't think it is important, but more so I can concentrate on one thing. Tom Rosmond wrote: ... snip ... Warning: Driver for device wlan0 recommend version 21 of Wireless Extension, but has been compiled with version 20, therefore some driver features may not be available... wlan0 IEEE 802.11 ESSID:olympicMode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:1B:2F:E3:DF:4A Bit Rate=1 Mb/s Tx-Power=27 dBm Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr=2352 B Link Quality=51/100 Signal level=-62 dBm Noise level=-95 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0 ... snip ... 3. Although the versions of madwifi and wireless-tools in SL 5.3 should be more current than I installed on the 32 bit system, the warning about version mismatch for the 64 bit system suggests otherwise. This I don't understand. ... snip ... This has me concerned because this isn't the first time I've seen this message. I'm worried that perhaps the machine I am compiling these on has a wrong version of a package or two. Despite my efforts I am not the greatest wireless expert and it's possible I'm doing something wrong with the compiling. From what I can tell, my 32 bit and 64 bit compile area's are the same for wireless. But maybe I am looking at the wrong packages. Does anyone know where I should start looking to track down this error? Or even if there is anything I can do to fix it? Troy -- -- Steven C. Timm, Ph.D (630) 840-8525 t...@fnal.gov http://home.fnal.gov/~timm/ Fermilab Computing Division, Scientific Computing Facilities, Grid Facilities Department, FermiGrid Services Group, Assistant Group Leader.
WG311T wireless issue
I have Netgear WG311T wireless PCI adapters (108 mbs) installed in two systems. 1. Generic 32bit PC (AMD processor) running Fedora 4. The adapter card was configure with madwifi (ver. 0.9.3)and wireless tools (ver. 29) that I installed myself. 2. 64 bit Dell Precision T7400 workstation (2 quadcore Intel Xeon processors) running SL 5.3 (64 bit). The adapter card was configured with madwifi (ver. 1:0.9.4-15) and wireless tools (ver. 1:28-2.el5) that came packaged with this SL distribution. The two systems sit virtually side by side. The wireless speeds I get for the first system to/from my Netgear wireless router are quite satisfactory - 20-30 mb/sec. From the 64 bit system, however, speeds are typically about 10% of that, and the connection is rather unreliable. Here is the 'iwconfig' and 'lspci -v' output for the 32 bit system: # lono wireless extensions. eth0 no wireless extensions. wifi0 no wireless extensions. ath0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:olympic Nickname:maple.reachone.com Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:1B:2F:E3:DF:4A Bit Rate:54 Mb/s Tx-Power:16 dBm Sensitivity=0/3 Retry:off RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:off Link Quality=28/94 Signal level=-67 dBm Noise level=-95 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0 sit0 no wireless extensions. cipsec0 no wireless extensions. 00:08.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC (rev 01) Subsystem: Netgear: Unknown device 5a00 Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 168, IRQ 9 Memory at dffe (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K] Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2 # And here it is for the 64 bit system: ## lono wireless extensions. wmaster0 no wireless extensions. Warning: Driver for device wlan0 recommend version 21 of Wireless Extension, but has been compiled with version 20, therefore some driver features may not be available... wlan0 IEEE 802.11 ESSID:olympic Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:1B:2F:E3:DF:4A Bit Rate=1 Mb/s Tx-Power=27 dBm Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr=2352 B Link Quality=51/100 Signal level=-62 dBm Noise level=-95 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0 sit0 no wireless extensions. cipsec0 no wireless extensions. 09:02.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. Atheros AR5001X + Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01) Subsystem: Netgear Unknown device 5a00 Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 168, IRQ 82 Memory at f7bf (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K] Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2 ### I am not an expert on wireless networking, but here are my observations from this comparison. 1. On the 32 bit system iwconfig detects the device as 'ath0' and 'IEEE 802.11g' and 'lspci -v' shows an AR5212 chipset, while on the 64 bit system it is 'wlan0' and 'IEEE 802.11' and the AR5001X chipset. However, when I swap the cards the results don't change, i.e. the results don't depend on which card is installed, but on the systems themselves. Since the 32 bit results are seem correct, it certainly look like the 64 bit system is misidentifying the device (Maybe a bios issue?) 2. The 54 mbs bit rate on the 32 bit system is quite stable, while the rate on the 64 bit system is quite erratic, varying from 1 to 11 mbs. 3. Although the versions of madwifi and wireless-tools in SL 5.3 should be more current than I installed on the 32 bit system, the warning about version mismatch for the 64 bit system suggests otherwise. This I don't understand. 4. Because I went to the trouble of swapping cards between the two systems, and it didn't make any difference, I don't think the problem is in the cards themselves. So, is the problem in the software, i.e. the SL madwifi and wireless-tools, or in the 64bit hardware? I would appreciate any suggestions or advice on this problem. I have considered trying 'ndiswrapper', but haven't had any luck finding a 64 bit Windows driver for this card. Besides, I would prefer not to do this, since this card is supposed to have native Linux support. Tom R.
