[gentoo-security] Re: ipw2200 + Intel Pro Wireless 2915 a/b/g: "ipw2200: Firmware error detected. Restarting."

[7v5w7go9ub0o]

On Wed, 25 Oct 2006 09:38:04 -0400, fire-eyes <sgtphou@×××××××××.org>  
wrote:

> I am having a very irritating problem with the wireless driver and card
> above. Sometimes, but not all the times, it gets into this phase where
> the wireless drops, comes back, drops, comes back (etc) and eventually I
> start seeing this in kernel logs:
>
> ipw2200: Firmware error detected.  Restarting.
>
> Unloading and reloading the module does not stop the issue, when it has
> begun. I have done some searching, and the typical advice is to make
> sure hardware crypto is off, by loading it like so:
>
> modprobe -v ipw2200 hwcrypto=0
>
> However this never stops it, or even causes it to calm down a bit.
>
> The most frustrating thing, is that this does not happen all the time. I
> use multiple wireless networks. All of them wide open, except for one,
> which was mine at home with WPA. That AP since bricked (warning: avoid
> LInksys WRT54G v5's, i'm not the only one this happened to) so I can no
> loner test. But when I used it, i saw the same things as I am describing
> here.

Hope that you get a more useful response.... FWIW, I Had precisely these  
symptoms on my Sony 2200 laptop - and can't tell you why - but it is rock  
sold now. I think there were two things going on:

1. This might be a "kill" switch? Some of my problems were certainly due  
to the kill switch.  I finally noticed that the little wireless LEDs were  
off. I had turned them off while using the windows OS - given that it is  
susceptable to the wonderful new driver attacks - and had failed to turn  
it on when booting up hardened Linux (which I believe is NOT susectable to  
the driver buffer overflows).

2. I also suggest a step by step walk-through of the following page (check  
your kernel config).

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_ipw2200

P.S. Contrary to their suggestion, I emerged the latest driver/firmware  
 from portage.

Newbie. (HTH; good luck.)


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