Freerunner can not maintain wireless connection to a Linux AP

[Al Johnson]

On Friday 05 February 2010, Yogiz wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I realise that this problem might equally well be the fault of my AP's
> configuration but since my Freerunner is the only client affected, I
> figured I'd start from here.
> 
> I have a linux PC that acts as a wireless AP using hostapd, ath5k
> drivers from the kernel and WPA2 for encryption. I have about 5-7
> laptops connected to the AP regularly and they have not had the same
> problem as the Freerunner.

I have a similar problem with my wrt54g (stock firmware) which doesn't play 
nicely with the power saving on the Freerunner's WiFi chipset. Try disabling 
the power saving mode using Freerunner. I don't remember if i need the 
iwconfig command, the wmiconfig command, or both, to make the connection 
reliable, but both  are mentioned in the wiki. If you use a roaming 
wpa_supplicant configuration in /etc/network/interfaces you can probably put 
the required commands in pre-up and post-down to automate its use on the 
access points that need it, but not those that don't. 

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Wifi#Disable_power_management

> The problem itself is as follows:
> 
> I connect to the AP from my freerunner, no matter what client I'm
> using, I've tried several. I see the AP in my scans, I initiate a
> connection and successfully receive an IP address from the dhcpd
> running on my AP. I start pinging the gateway at once and pings are
> successes. That means in that moment of time, I have a fully functional
> connection to my AP with encryption and everything working. Now it
> takes some time, about 10 seconds to a minute and my pings start
> failing all at once. I can't connect to anything on the network from my
> Freerunner anymore. When I inspected the connection from another laptop
> using Wireshark, I saw that the first ARP request from the Freerunner
> was a success but the second one (that comes after the variable time
> 10-60 seconds in the middle of pinging) will not get a reply from the
> AP. From then on, the connection is lost, the pings travel to the
> monitoring laptop but no longer get any replies from the AP. It seems
> like the AP is at fault here, but every single other thing I've
> connected to the AP has remained working, so there must be something
> different about the Freerunner. If anyone has any idea, what may be the
> fault here, please do.