Re: ath0: device timeout

["Steven M. Bellovin" <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:01:15 +1100
Paul Ripke <stix%stix.id.au@localhost> wrote:

> I'm after ideas... I have an otherwise mostly stable netbsd-4 box
> with an ath0 card running hostap for my home network. I recently got
> a Android G1 phone, and since getting it, my MacBook Pro laptop
> (OS X) frequently times out wireless connections (eg. ssh). It might
> be 2 minutes, it might be an hour.  Meanwhile, an ssh session from
> the G1, attached to the same screen session is fine. If I turn the
> wireless off on the G1, the laptop stays connected fine.
> 
> Whenever the laptop times out, I get "ath0: device timeout" to syslog,
> although connections from the G1 are fine. It's usually a while before
> even pings from the laptop come through. I've captured some of the
> timeouts with debug enabled on the interface - log is available to
> anyone that wants to take a look.
> 
I've found that putting

        hw.ath0.txintrperiod=1

into /etc/sysctl.conf helps, though it doesn't solve the problem.  (I
don't remember who suggested that to me.)

For reasons I don't understand, I also get much better behavior out of
wireless if I'm running wpa_supplicant, even for WEP.

                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb