Re: An Athn ar9280 client seems to require cold boots of late?

I have a similar problem with the 6.7 release which I just installed today
on an 8Tb drive I'm using with my older ASUS laptop.

athn0 at pci3 dev 0 function 0 "Atheros AR9285" rev 0x01: apic 2 int 17
athn0: AR9285 rev 2 (1T1R), ROM rev 13, address 74:f0:6d:7a:42:7f

Can't seem to shake it with a cold boot. However I have some interesting
other effects. I have several wireless routers, one of which is quite old
and doesn't even do wpa. It's a UBNT antenna that I use to broadcast
around the farm. So without any password at all, even the old kind, if I

ifconfig athn0 -wpakey
ifconfig athn0 nwid UBNT
dhclient athn0

That works fine.

Now, I can also project wireless from my cellphone using wpa2. Sometimes
it works and sometimes it doesn't. I don't know if it's after a cold boot
of the laptop, but what does work for me it to just disable the hotspot
from the cellphone for a moment, and then re-enable it. Then it works
fine with the nwid I set up and the wpa2 password I require.

However no matter what I do I can't get a connection to my farmhouse
wireless router. It's a DIR822 Dlink. Of course I know that's a low end
router. Recently they recommended a firmware upgrade, and since then I
found that I was unable to set it up for no password, and had to add one,
and then add that password to all the other devices in the house.

Just now I saw that I can enable projecting a separate "guest" zone
network from it, and that seems to allow having a null password. However
neither with a null password nor with an 8 letter password and can I get
it to connect to the ASUS athn0

I think I have had athn problems before with the ASUS, and I used to have
a spare USB wireless of some sort that was more reliable, but I gave it
away, after not having such problems with some other more recent releases
(but before 6.7). Wish I could remember what it was.

If anyone has a recommendation for a reliable USB wireless stick that
I can find on eBay, and plays well with athn, I'd be grateful.

Moreover, if anyone can fix the problem before I go to that extreme, I'll
send him the shirt off my back... Happens I have about 1,000 OpenBSD
T-shirts :-)

Austin



On Fri, 26 Jun 2020, Kevin Chadwick wrote:

> After upgrading via sysupgrade for a few releases, I have had to cold boot to
> get dhclient athn0 working on an ar9280 in client mode.
>
> Since my latest upgrade to a snapshot of Jun 17 kernel #275 with the previous
> kernel being from Jun 2nd #237. I seem to have to cold boot after running
> ifconfig athn0 down and then back up, where I'm *fairly* sure that I didn't need
> to before that Jun 17th upgrade. ifconfig debug mode shows the wireless
> handshake completing 4/4. Yet dhclient can't establish a link until cold booted.
> A warm reboot does not resolve the problem.
>
> Has anyone else seen this or can reproduce it?
>
> I'll try a sysupgrade in the meantime but I'm not sure there has been any code
> changes in areas that could resolve it.
>