Hey all,

I've recently set up a network with a Netgear wgr614v6 as the router. All 5 machines on the network run Linux (Slackware on all but an Eee PC and a roomate's desktop with Xubuntu and Kubuntu, respectively).

Any machine that is wired to the network works flawlessly, even the two machines I'm having troubles with. The Eee can wirelessly connect without any issues, however my problem children seem to be two Thinkpad R61i running Slackware 12.1.

They have the Intel 3495 chipset, with the appropriate drivers loaded but when I attempt to have an ip address assigned through dhcp, it exits on an error. When I look at the connection by way of iwconfig, I see that the machine is not associated to the access point. It gets even worse, in that when I scan with `iwlist wlan0 scan` I recieve an error stating "wlan0 - resource temporarily unavailable."

I'm pulling my beard out trying to figure out what the problem is; it's only limited to these two machines and everything else is fine. I went so far as to leave the wireless connection unencrypted in order to minimize points of failure and it's still happening. I've set the MACs for the two laptops in the router, but that is getting me nowhere.

If anyone can give me a hand with this, I'd be grateful. If there is any additional info needed, let me know and I will happily post it.



Thanks!


<EDIT> Sorry, I'd forgotten to mention that I have been able to access wireless networks with these laptops before setting up my new router and never ran into a problem like this.

I hate to bump a post, but there have been 30 views and no replies; did I not give enough info, or is this a real head-scratcher? If I'm not giving the appropriate info, jut let me know and I'll quickly provide it.

did you load firmware?
what driver is in use - ipw or iwl?

I'm using the I had the firmware loaded before a reinstall that I just did on one laptop. Thanks for reminding me about that. I'm certain that I had it loaded for the second laptop.


Upon further inspection, it appears that I didn't load it correctly. I'm going through the steps in the Intel Laptop Products page and hopefully that will work it out. Boy, is my face red.


Thanks for the help!

Well, I went through the steps on both machines and still receive the same problems. I've made sure the microcode is in the /lib/firmware directory, I've restarted, and I've removed the module and reloaded. I still fail to associate with any network, and cannot figure out why.

Can anyone help me out here?

Maybe you have the same problem I experienced:
a DHCP_TIMEOUT problem.
See http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...945abg-661592/

I have had unexplainable issues with this router some time ago - it was working, then it suddenly was not anymore.
Wired was always o.k.
I did not really search for the problem like you did - my laptop was and is the only client using it.
Just looked at the firmware-version and checked if there was an update available. Turned out that there was a firmware update (I bought the device as used - it was new more than two years ago).
Did the update - and it has not given me problems since. Therefore I assume the problem was with the routers firmware, but cannot be sure.

I updated the firmware without any successful change, so at this point I'm looking into seeing if upgrading my kernel will help or if it will be easier to downgrade the driver to ipw3945. This is, of course, after I double-check the DHCP_TIMEOUT setting in the one Thinkpad that has been subjected to the tests. Thanks for the feedback so far; I'll post to mark what the cause of the problem is when it's solved.



<EDIT> Editing rc.inet1.conf to clear up the dhcp timeout didn't fix the issue, either. I'm even more stumped now, as when I type in
it works! There's actually a list of wireless networks in the area, and that wasn't the case when I started the thread. Do you guys think that trying to reinstall the driver, downgrading the driver, or compiling a newer kernel are the only options left at this point? Any other thoughts?

In case anyone finds this thread because they're having a similar issue, it DID in fact turn out to be a driver issue. I was hoping that compiling a new kernel with more up-to-date iwl3945 drivers would fix the issue, but it did not. I then decided to try downgrading the driver to ipw3945. After the downgrade, everything woks perfectly and there are no more issues with the connection for the two Thinkpads. Thanks again, everyone!

Sorry to bring this thread back, but I wanted to post an update.

After installing the patched module on both Thinkpads, they both started acting strangely. I had updated the kernel on mine to 2.26.2 and left the other at the default huge-smp, but both had the exact same problems (listed in a sec) immediately after installing the patched driver.

If left with an idle wireless connection for too long in an X session, the connectivity would drop and you could not connect to an xterm to troubleshoot. The X session would get very slow and eventually freeze, prompting a ctl+alt+backspace to reset it, at which point the xserver would fail to restart. The problem was fixed after re-running xorgconfig. I don't know if anyone else ran into an issue like that, or if I did something wrong, but it was enough of a pain to keep me checking on the iwl driver, which leads me to:

I downloaded the new iwl3945 microcode image (dated Sept 1st) and removed the ipw3945 module and everything works great! It looks like they finally got everything running well with iwl3945, so if anyone else had a problem similar to my original issue, check the new ucode from http://intellinuxwireless.org/?n=downloads

Thanks to everyone who helped out with my problem!