[ltp] atheros wireless on T61

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 00:22:15 -0400

Hi:

I have a T61 with an Atheros AR5418 wireless chip. It works fine with
the Madwifi subversion drivers, except there's something weird with
the DHCP discovery:

$ sudo ifup ath0=home-dhcp
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.4
Copyright 2004-2006 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/sw/dhcp/

wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
Listening on LPF/ath0/
Sending on   LPF/ath0/
Sending on   Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on ath0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 3
DHCPDISCOVER on ath0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 3
DHCPDISCOVER on ath0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 6
DHCPDISCOVER on ath0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7
DHCPDISCOVER on ath0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 20
DHCPDISCOVER on ath0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 15
DHCPDISCOVER on ath0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7
No DHCPOFFERS received.
No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.

However, if I take down the interface and then immediately bring it up
again, it works fine the second time:

$ sudo ifdown ath0
There is already a pid file /var/run/dhclient.ath0.pid with pid 3704
killed old client process, removed PID file
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.4
Copyright 2004-2006 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/sw/dhcp/

wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
Listening on LPF/ath0/
Sending on   LPF/ath0/
Sending on   Socket/fallback
DHCPRELEASE on ath0 to 192.168.1.1 port 67

wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
Listening on LPF/ath0/
Sending on   LPF/ath0/
Sending on   Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on ath0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7
DHCPOFFER from 192.168.1.1
DHCPREQUEST on ath0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPACK from 192.168.1.1
bound to 192.168.1.101 -- renewal in 229919 seconds.

I've upgraded to the latest wireless tools (v29), but that doesn't
seem to help. Anyone else have this problem/know a solution?

Thanks.

Joseph