December 30, 2002
Linksys wireless woes

I've a linksys wireless router and a pcmcia card in my laptop. There appears to be a bug in the card's firmware -- or it could be the redhat wireless driver.

When transferring larger files, the router floods the card with information at a higher speed than the card can accept and the expectant result is of course an overflowed buffer.. at which point the card has to be reset otherwise it just fills up system logs with error messages and nothing works..

I found a temporary solutions.. which is to limit the transfer rate at the router to 2MBps for wireless and it no longer happens.. slower wireless is better than a card reset every time I want to transfer files to/from my laptop.

Permanent solution? Maybe get rid of bloody redhat on my laptop and put a real linux system on it.

Error (for reference): (kernel ethx) Error -110 writing Tx descriptor to BAP

Posted December 30, 2002 07:25 PM in Geek Stuff
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Comments
On December 30, 2002 07:58 PM garrett added:

i've been less then thrilled with the linksys wireless hardware i've seen. my linksys wireless router didn't work with freebsd (or mac os apparently, although it did of course work with windows) when i first got it.

it turned out to be a bug in the router's firmware. it was sending out packets that had flags set that made no sense (if i remember correctly, it's been a while. the actual bug and patch are in the archives of the freebsd-mobile list somewhere). i guess windows checked in a different order and broke out of the loop at the right point so it ignored the invalid flags.

someone eventually found a work around that involved hacking the driver on my freebsd box. of course in the meantime i had given up and bought another brand of wireless router.

the other router ended up dying a painful death a few months later, and it turned out that linksys had issued a patch that fixed the problem by then, but i still don't have the best feelings about anything related to linksys hardware.

in any event, this is certainly not going to help you with your problem, but i heard 'linksys' and had to throw my two cents in.

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On December 30, 2002 08:47 PM Dan Isaacs added:

Yeah, the WEP11 had a bunch of firmware issues. I dealt with many of the IPSEC problems, but wasn't aware of those large file issues. What did Google tell you?

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On December 30, 2002 09:06 PM kasia added:

The only thing I pulled up is a bug in an older version of the orinoco driver.. that's it.

Google failed me :(

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On December 31, 2002 01:19 AM Jeremy Zawodny added:

I've had excellent luck with my Linksys WAP11. Tested with Linux, Mac OS X, and various flavors of windows.

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On December 31, 2002 08:02 AM Jan Chrillesen added:

I had a similar issue with my Cisco 340 AP and it turned out to be a malfunction in the AP and I got a replacement. But since you get the errors on your client it might be a driver or card issue. If possible you should test your AP with another client card and see if that makes any difference, or even (sic!) boot into Wind*ws and test using an Official Approved driver :)

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On January 31, 2003 07:03 PM vandewal added:

Found this page about a new driver version to fix this and since this seemed to be the only spot on the web with a workaround posted (i.e. 2mb step down) I thought I would pass this on.

http://www.ece.northwestern.edu/cpdc/pjoisha/lvp.html

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