On Wed, Jan 09, 2008 at 02:21:08AM +0000, Mark Fletcher wrote: > A few days ago, in the middle of a spam storm, I wrote: > > > > > Hi list > > > > I'm running etch on a Toshiba Satellite laptop I picked up about a year > > ago now in Hong Kong. It's on my home wireless LAN supported by a > > Buffalo Airstation 54G which I bought recently here in Japan. The > > wireless LAN card in the laptop is an inbuilt Intel ipw3945. > > > > If I configure my interfaces file to use WEP, and configure my wireless > > router accordingly, everything works perfectly. > > > > However, I recently made the switch to WPA. What I notice now is that > > when I boot up the initial attempt to get an IP address from the > > wireless router via DHCP USUALLY fails (very occasionally works first > > time, but hasn't for ages now) -- times out and eventually gives up. The > > boot then continues and I end up in gdm as normal. If I now log straight > > in I will find networking is not working. However, if I just leave it > > for a while and go make a coffee or something, when I come back and log > > in, networking will be working. So something is clearly trying again > > later and succeeding the second time. > > I just discovered last night that, whilst my machine displays the below symptoms > using the stock etch-packaged 2.6.18-5-686 kernel, a 2.6.22 kernel I built > myself from kernel.org does not -- the network comes up properly at boot time. > For that kernel I built the ipw3945 driver myself (with help from the source > package maintainer!) from the source in unstable (was advised to do so by the > package maintainer, don't remember why). Wonder if the ipw3945 driver in the > stock kernel is at the root of this? Or am I getting too OT for this list? FWIW I've seen some similar behavior with no explicable pattern. Sometimes my networking comes right up and sometimes it doesn't. The other day I had to actually modprobe -r ipw3945 and then reinsert it to get it all working while also working some mojo with the radio control switch. This is on sid, relatively up-to-date and no relevant upgrades between the time it was working and not. Of course now it just works again, for no known reason. I think it's safe to say that ipw3945 can be a little flaky? A
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