[Thinkpad] Wireless gone?

Hi,

it seems my wireless card (Harris Semiconductor Prism 2.5 - builtin
miniPCI in my IBM Thinkpad A31p) kissed me good bye recently. It just
stopped connecting to my AP (1stwave AP2i).

After 3 days (literally) of trying to fix things, I must give up and
ask for any help I can get. It used to work perfectly with this
configuration:

NIC: id=0x8013 v1.0.0
PRI: id=0x15 v1.1.0
STA: id=0x1f v1.4.9

the hostap driver was 0.0.0 CVS (something from 2002), Linux-Kernel
was 2.4.22, I run SuSE Linux 8.2; After upgrading the machine to 1GB
RAM, I had also to upgrade several of the software components.

I did an upgrade to 2.4.26 kernel and tested the whole
system. Everything worked ok - including the wireless subsystem (at
Home). That was about two weeks ago. Then I realized, that in the
company that I visit from time to time and connect to their wireless
(some Wisecom 22MBps AP) I cannot connect anymore. About 3 days ago I
realized that the connectivity to my Home wireless is somehow bad
(slow, lossy), then I didn't get any connection anymore.

Since then I upgraded to hostap 0.2.4, upgraded STA to 1.8.0, but all
I get is:

Aug 22 12:25:09 sol kernel: wifi0: TXEXC - status=0x0004 ([Discon])
tx_control=000c
Aug 22 12:25:09 sol kernel: retry_count=0 tx_rate=0 fc=0x4108
(Data::0 ToDS)
Aug 22 12:25:09 sol kernel: A1=00:00:00:00:00:00
A2=00:20:e0:8d:70:7d A3=33:33:00:00:00:16 A4=00:00:00:00:00:00

A1, A3 and A4 are completedly bogus. Not that I haven't had this kind
of message in my log, it's there since I'm using WLAN, but there
always were successfull connections.

What's worse, that all auxiliary functionality of the tools also
doesn't work:

# iwlist wlan0 scanning
wlan0 No scan results

I'm pretty sure, that my AP is working, because when I connect via ETH
to it, all is fine, AND it also is connected (via WLAN) to another AP
(same model) to connect my home-office with the company.

              WLAN ETH ETH Line
<AP-Home> - - - - - <AP-Company> ---- Switch --- DSL ------ Internet

So if I connect to AP-Home via eth0 all is ok - I see the AP-Home,
AP-Company, have Internet.

If I try to connect to AP-Home via WLAN, no connection. I also seem
not to be able to connect directly to the AP-Company via wireless from
my Laptop (which was possible when turning of the AP-Home and standing
in "line of sight" to the 90m distant yagi of AP-Company.

Output from ifconfig and iwconfig is as follows:

Output from ifconfig and iwconfig is as follows:

sol:/etc # ifconfig
lo Protokoll:Lokale Schleife
          inet Adresse:127.0.0.1 Maske:255.0.0.0
          inet6 Adresse: ::1/128 Gültigkeitsbereich:Maschine
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
          RX packets:62 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:62 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          Kollisionen:0 Sendewarteschlangenlänge:0
          RX bytes:9347 (9.1 Kb) TX bytes:9347 (9.1 Kb)

wifi0 Protokoll:UNSPEC Hardware Adresse
00-20-E0-8D-70-7D-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00
          UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:13 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          Kollisionen:0 Sendewarteschlangenlänge:1000
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:948 (948.0 b)
          Interrupt:11 Speicher:f88bc000-f88bd000

wlan0 Protokoll:Ethernet Hardware Adresse 00:20:E0:8D:70:7D
          inet Adresse:192.168.1.4 Bcast:192.168.1.255
          Maske:255.255.255.0
          inet6 Adresse: fe80::220:e0ff:fe8d:707d/64
          Gültigkeitsbereich:Verbindung
          UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1550 Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:13 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          Kollisionen:0 Sendewarteschlangenlänge:0
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:948 (948.0 b)
          Interrupt:11 Speicher:f88bc000-f88bd000

sol:/etc # iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

sit0 no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

wifi0 IEEE 802.11b ESSID:"petawnetwork" Nickname:"sol"
          Mode:Managed Frequency:2.467GHz Access Point:
          44:44:44:44:44:44
          Bit Rate:2Mb/s Sensitivity=1/3
          Retry min limit:8 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:5403-0218-07 Security mode:restricted
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:0/70 Signal level:-73 dBm Noise level:-73 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

wlan0 IEEE 802.11b ESSID:"petawnetwork" Nickname:"sol"
          Mode:Managed Frequency:2.467GHz Access Point:
          44:44:44:44:44:44
          Bit Rate:2Mb/s Sensitivity=1/3
          Retry min limit:8 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:5403-0218-07 Security mode:restricted
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:0/70 Signal level:-73 dBm Noise level:-73 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

I also tried to remove 512MB memory to see if there were no
side-effects
(probably from mm-io), but result is the same.
Oh - BTW - I don't get a connection under XP also. But everywhere
the drivers don't complain.

So to sum up:

3 Access points and my A31p:
  - I cannot connect to any of the APs anymore neither under Linux nor
    under XP
  - neither Linux nor XP complain about problems with the MiniPCI card
    (HW seems to be ok)
  - 2 APs definitedly work
  - It definitedly worked with the new HW/SW-configuration for some time

What to do?

-- 
best regards,
     Dipl.-Inf. Richard Jelinek
     - The PetaMem Group - Prague/Nuremberg - www.petamem.com -
		       -= 3394928 Mind Units =-
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