Freerunner can not maintain wireless connection to a Linux AP

[Yogiz]

I'll be damned. I did the wmiconfig one and the connection is now
stable as rock, even when going long distance between Freerunner and
AP.

Thanks a lot.

Yogiz

On Fri, 5 Feb 2010 18:12:51 +0000
Al Johnson <openmoko at mazikeen.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> 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.
> 
> 
> 
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