I ran the update last night and my Access Point died!
It seems that the update has renamed my wireless interface from wlan0 to ath0.
I also noted that the wlan0.mon and wireless.mon interfaces are not there any more? I may not have exactly the right names - 'cos there not there to check!
Okay, I thought, I’ll not fight the system. I’ll change hostapd.conf (interface=ath0) to reflect the new interface name. But you gessed it… Still no go!
Can anyone suggest what else I must do to get my AP back after the 2.6.27.42 upgrade?
The two missing interfaces seemed to have been replaced by: “wifi0”?
And when I try and fire up Hostapd, I get this:
**
Configuration file: hostapd.conf
ctrl_interface_group=0
Failed to create interface mon.ath0
nl80211 driver initalization failed
ath0: Unable to setup interface.
rmdir[ctrl_interface]: No such file or directory**
Hi Akoellh,
To the rescue again! Forgive me for not recognising the subtle difference. It all happened in one operation and I’m still VERY new at this game!
P.S.
I maybe know the reason, why madwifi is working now with your card and did not before, nice to know as I am maintaining those packages in OBS.
Ah… that sounds intriguing? Yet again, I am at a loss to understand the meaning of this. But if you have any advice on how I can get back to a working system, I’d be VERY grateful.
You already have the advise, if you installed something that “broke” it (in fact, if it is what I am thinking of, it did not “break” anything, on the contrary), then uninstall it again.
Gosh… That was no fun!!
Uninstalled, madwifi - and lost the whole interface! The only way I could find to get it back was to boot the system with the card removed from the motherboard. Then shutdown, reinstall the card and bring the system backup again.
What’s going on here? How is hardware detected? And if not auto-detected, where/how does one load the firmware drivers for hardware that you know is installed?
But I guess these are questions for another forum? The good news is that Akoellh was correct, it seemed to be the madwifi upgrade. So, I suspect, as result of some earlier attempts at getting an Access Point working, I had installed these drivers. They then lay about in the system doing nothing until an upgrade comes along and they jump into life!
Which leads on to yet another question…
How can one vet all the upgrades that come along? In another world, support is generally refused unless one is all patched and upto date will all the latest releases.
Does it boil down to a question of trust and hope that you can back out of any problems (as in this case).
> What’s going on here? How is hardware detected? And if not
> auto-detected, where/how does one load the firmware drivers for hardware
> that you know is installed?
Hardware is detected by the PCI IDs or USB IDs, depending on which bus it uses
for connection. Each driver has a table that indicates what ID’s it will handle.
These tables are interrogated by the kernel during the device detection phase of
booting. Firmware and drivers are different beasts, thus the phrase “firmware
drivers” makes no sense. Drivers run in the host CPU - firmware runs in the CPU
on-board the device. The driver usually asks the kernel to load the firmware and
it specifies the file name and the directory where that firmware should be
loaded. If a particular device’s driver is blacklisted, then one needs to use
/sbin/modprobe to load the driver.
Thank you iwfinger(?), for coming back,
I hope you will forgive the paraphrasing above.
Can I ask about step 1. first?
How can I confirm this hardware detection phase? I am using SuSE 11.1, and if I run YaST Control Centre | Hardware, at one time during my recent tribulations did NOT have an entry for the AR5008 Wireless Network Adaptor - even though it was install in its PCI slot. Does this confirm that “Hardware Detection” has failed?
Just for the record (and especially for Larry, he might find this interesting):
cd ~/development-sources/madwifi/
svn log -r 4107
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r4107 | proski | 2010-01-13 07:50:17 +0100 (Mi, 13. Jan 2010) | 2 lines
Add support for AR9280 from FreeBSD HAL
On 01/18/2010 08:36 AM, martinprowe wrote:
>
> lwfinger;2106115 Wrote:
>>
>> 1. Hardware is detected by the PCI IDs
>> 2. Each driver has a table that indicates what ID’s it will handle.
>> 3. These tables are interrogated by the kernel during the device
>> detection phase of
>> booting.
>
> Thank you iwfinger(?), for coming back,
> I hope you will forgive the paraphrasing above.
>
> Can I ask about step 1. first?
> How can I confirm this hardware detection phase? I am using SuSE 11.1,
> and if I run YaST Control Centre | Hardware, at one time during my
> recent tribulations did NOT have an entry for the AR5008 Wireless
> Network Adaptor - even though it was install in its PCI slot. Does this
> confirm that “Hardware Detection” has failed?
Was there an entry in the lspci output? If not, either the device is disabled in
the BIOS, or the hardware has failed.