Lenny with Atheros AR522/AR5213 Chipset

Greetings to all;

I replaced Etch with a fresh install of Lenny and the only major problem
is with the ATH5K driver -- which is enabled by default. It will not
maintain a connection to my home network (no security).

The behavior is rather strange, as it will connect (with a reading of
100% when I am in my office next to the router), and after a short time
the network manager (Gnome) will drop to 0%.

Sometimes it will reconnect when a page request is made -- sometimes
not, and frequently the Icon on the taskbar will disappear and not
return until the system is rebooted.

It seems to be able to maintain a wired connection.

Are there some setting I can check?

Searching for answers have only led me to people suggesting that ATH5K
be blacklisted, and that the Madwifi driver be used (it worked very well
with Etch). I've also seen a reference to using "Wicd" as a network
manager because people have encountered problems with the Atheros chip
set, but I'm not familiar with that program.

Help would be appreciated...

As I have been using Etch on several machines since its stable release
I'm not exactly new to Debian -- but I don't consider myself an expert
either.

Thanks

Richard


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On Sun, Mar 08, 2009 at 03:55:45PM -0600, Richard Werst wrote:
....
> The behavior is rather strange, as it will connect (with a reading of
> 100% when I am in my office next to the router), and after a short time
> the network manager (Gnome) will drop to 0%.
....
> Are there some setting I can check?

post a chunk of syslog recorded while these events occur (link ok, data
flow, link lost, link ok, ... etc). Perhaps even better if you manage to
enable ath5k debug.
As a basic visible monitor, in a terminal keep a ping(1) to some stable
node beyond the AP (or the AP itself) running; check 'time' param
fluctuations. If it's the hw going to sleep if no data flows, then the
ping could keep it up.

> Searching for answers have only led me to people suggesting that ATH5K
> be blacklisted, and that the Madwifi driver be used (it worked very well

try that, if you can. That'd tell (likely) whether it's ath5k's or some
(net) daemon's issue.

Note, I don't use Gnome's NM, so can't provide hints there - I'm sure
other will chime in.

--
paolo


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