Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 + Mandriva on an HP NC6400

[Guest patriki]

I've been searching around for a solution to this but it seems noone has had this problem except for me...

 

My work PC is an HP NC6400, a nice little laptop which makes use of the "Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)" (lspci output) as wireless NIC. Intel's wlan cards seem to be a major pain for many in Linux - I've solved most of the "common" problems but this last one has me stumped.

 

I'm running Mandriva 2007.0 RC2, using the ipw3945 kernel module. My /etc/modprobe.d/ipw3945 looks like this:

install ipw3945 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install ipw3945; sleep 0.5; /usr/sbin/ipw3945d --quiet; sleep 1
remove  ipw3945 /usr/sbin/ipw3945d --kill; /sbin/modprobe -r --ignore-remove ipw3945

 

The first problem was to turn off the software kill switch that was apparently on. That was solved by booting up Windows and enabling the NIC from there.

 

The problem right now is that I can tell the NIC to scan for wireless networks, and it will give me a correct result, but as soon as I actually have it try to connect to anything it will just report that signal strength is 0.

Looking at /var/log/messages, it turns out that something is fishy right from the start when loading the module:

Sep 26 13:26:44 chihiro kernel: ipw3945: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945 Network Connection driver for Linux, 1.1.0-pre2mp
Sep 26 13:26:44 chihiro kernel: ipw3945: Copyright(c) 2003-2006 Intel Corporation
Sep 26 13:26:44 chihiro kernel: ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:10:00.0[A] -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17
Sep 26 13:26:44 chihiro kernel: ipw3945: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection
Sep 26 13:26:45 chihiro kernel: ipw3945: Detected geography ABG (13 802.11bg channels, 23 802.11a channels)
Sep 26 13:26:45 chihiro kernel: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth1: link is not ready
Sep 26 13:26:45 chihiro ifplugd(eth1)[9387]: ifplugd 0.28 initializing.
Sep 26 13:26:45 chihiro ifplugd(eth1)[9387]: Using interface eth1/00:13:02:xx:xx:xx with driver <ipw3945> (version: 1.1.0-pre2mp)
Sep 26 13:26:45 chihiro ifplugd(eth1)[9387]: Using detection mode: SIOCETHTOOL
Sep 26 13:26:45 chihiro ifplugd(eth1)[9387]: Initialization complete, link beat not detected.

 

This problem is regardless of if the AP I'm trying to connect to uses any form of encryption or not. I simply and constantly get a signal strength of zero. even with links that show a signal strength close to 100 when scanning.

 

Example, output from "iwlist eth1 scanning" for one AP:

		  Cell 04 - Address: 00:09:xx:xx:xx:xx
				ESSID:"Plus"
				Protocol:IEEE 802.11b
				Mode:Master
				Channel:4
				Encryption key:off
				Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s
				Quality=46/100  Signal level=-81 dBm  Noise level=-81 dBm
				Extra: Last beacon: 1948ms ago

 

...and the corresponding iwconfig output after trying to connect to the AP:

eth1	  unassociated  ESSID:"Plus"  Nickname:"chihiro"
	  Mode:Managed  Frequency=2.427 GHz  Access Point: 00:09:xx:xx:xx:xx
	  Bit Rate:0 kb/s   Tx-Power:16 dBm
	  Retry limit:15   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
	  Encryption key:off
	  Power Management:off
	  Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
	  Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
	  Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:244   Missed beacon:0

 

The "Last beacon" time seems a bit fishy, and possibly corresponds to the time since boot.

 

I tried using ndiswrapper instead, it gave me similar results, only difference being that it listed all the same APs nearby, but saying all of them had link quality zero already when running iwlist.

 

Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance!

 

 

[moved from Hardware by spinynorman - welcome aboard :)]