ath5k woes

okay, is everyone else out there as bugged as i am about the ath5k driver? it seems like every ubuntu maintenance update i've done over the last couple of months on my acer aspire one has made it worse. i just downgraded back to 2.6.32-21-generic, which works pretty well (though i did get a bunch of 'ath5k phy0: failed to wake up the MAC Chip' and 'ath5k phy0: can't reset hardware (-5)' after i let it run for a while). i've been have other hardware problems with the ssd drive and the web cam, but i think this one is a driver issue given the chatter i've found on mail lists and bug reports. i know it's oss, so i can't really complain, but i'm really looking forward to this being resolved. i wonder if i should lag my kernel updates and/or switch to madwifi or something.... EDIT: don't think madwifi is the answer, since it looks like their dev effort got folded back into the ath5k. at least, i couldn't find a madwifi version that would both compile with my kernel and work with my pci-e wifi. but i seem to recall looking at the L0s, L1 ASPM stuff before with the unsupported jumbo problems, and i noticed that now all aspm support is turned off by default on my card. (dmesg even says the pci driver explicitly decides to do it.) this change was apparently made because junky old pcie wireless cards, like i have in my acer aspire, get the unsupported jumbos in L0s. but L1 is supposed to be a mandatory part of the standard (L0s is optional). so maybe something is trying to shove it into L1 without checking that that's enabled. i tried turning L1 back on with the enable-aspm script (with root complex 00:1c.2 and endpoint 03:00.0) but it didn't seem to do anything. so i put the pcie_aspm=force kernel option into /boot/grub/grub.cfg, and that worked. in fact, it only enabled aspm for the atheros and its pci-e port, and only L1 for that. i guess the ath5k devs or somebody actually put code in to check if it can do it. so that's good; shouldn't get any of the jumbo problems, even with the =force. so now we'll just see if this helps with the 'ath5k phy0: failed to wakeup the MAC Chip' and 'ath5k phy0:can't reset hardware (-5)' problems.

wireless measurements

right now, with one of the default whip monopoles, i get about 30 yards range outside my house for my wap. i'd like to go about 10 times that in one direction. so that would be 10 dbi gain needed for an antenna. that should be doable with a homebrew.

homebrew wifi antennae, aircrack

i found a few good links on homebrew directional wifi antennae. this one gives a comparison between different designs and shows that soup can wave guides beat pringles cans. bottom line: nalley 40oz 'big chunk' beef stew wins, with a 16 dbi gain. here's a design for a helical, also advertised at 16 dbi. maybe i could make it better by increasing the length, but if it's the same gain as the soup can, i might as well make the easier one (which costs practically nothing considering i can eat the soup). some dish designs might do even better, but that means i have to buy a usb wifi and set up network bridging with the server. either of the other two can connect directly to the wap, after i remove one of the built-ins. speaking of which, that means i'll need to pick up a RP-TNC connect at radio smack. on a related subject, here's a tutorial on using aircrack. no, i don't plan to use these together, and neither should you.

fixing the wireless access point

my linksys wrt54g hasn't been working well lately, thanks to neighbors who just pop up their own networks without checking which channels are already being used. my problem is that i'm not using the gateway/dhcp features of the linksys, since i already had a lan on 10.0.0.x. so i couldn't log in to the linksys' web admin page. here's how i fixed it: with kismet, i determined that channels 1, 6, 9, and 11 were being used within range of my house. a little scanning the neighborhood picked up channel 3, too. channels 1-11 are legal in north america, according to /etc/conf.d/wireless.example. so i'm going to use channel 4. i got into the default linksys network by booting the wap unplugged from ethernet starting my eth1 on the same channel, with dhcp. my wireless ip was then 192.168.1.101. http://192.168.1.1/ got me to the admin page for the linksys. default username and password are 'admin' and 'admin'. once i was in, i turned off the dhcp server. (apparently things got turned back on from a reset.) pretty simple menu navigation to change the channel settings and get security back. i used a wep passphrase. (i seem to recall it was too much hassle to use wpa with linux before, and i don't think any of my neighbors are very 1337, given their ignorant clobbering of my network in the first place.) 128 bit, 26 hex digits conveniently generated by linksys. had to reboot linksys and restart eth1 (with manual ip now that dhcp is off) after changing the channel and turning on wep. reset the password under the administration tab, changed the ip to 10.0.0.101, and rebooted linksys. after a couple of minutes, i could log into web admin again. no more messing around with 192.168! hooray! something odd that i noticed was that the wireless card kept wanting to use the old channel 6, even though i set channel_eth1="4" in /etc/conf.d/net. the only workaround i could find was to take out the channel_eth1 line and let it choose the channel automatically by the essid. this worked as long as i was connecting only to the linksys, without dhcp. once i plugged the linksys into the lan and used the dhcp server on my dsl modem, it would still report using channel 6. but it worked. weird.