Crash after wireless setup, Dell D600

[mike-chipper]

I downloaded and installed Ver. 9.0 yesterday. It booted to KDE and was working very well, and I tried to get wireless going. Brought up the network utility and clicked to show panel icon, and after a reboot got that. It told me I had to set IP numbers. I selected the 2nd tab of the wireless utility and clicked to set DHCP automatically. After the accept or OK button, KDE was locked up rock hard. Nothing worked and after 5 minutes I manually shut off the power. It will not boot up now. I get the initial PC-BSD Boot Screen, then it looks like it boots, stopping at a text login prompt. Nothing more. (if I type "startx" it locks up w/ black screen.)

When it worked it sat there a few seconds then brought up the graphic log in screen and from there worked fine bringing up KDE.

I've been looking over the PC-BSD User's Handbook and just can't find a hint. I would like to avoid reloading again, it takes 2 hours on the laptop. Then if it is going to go into some limp mode after a hard power down, I need to know how to fix it. Thank you for any and all help in this matter. ---mike

[kmoore134]

Sounds like you are getting a kernel panic when enabling the wifi.. This
is most likely wiping our your /etc/rc.conf file, which is one of the
last files touched before enabling the new wifi settings. If you backup
this file, and the system crashes again, you can restore it from the
backup and reboot to get back to your desktop.

[michaelp]

same thing happened to me but I re-installed. Wireless comes on but doesn't really work. the wifi light comes on even but I cannot connect. I'm not so concerned about it I'm going to install again in a couple days as I downloaded the DVD instead and will get it worked out.

[mike-chipper]

I tried a wireless USB and it connected saying "associated". Didn't work, and another thread tells how to manually fix that depending on if you have an open system or encrypted like WEP.

Too much trouble for me, I take this thing around and some are open others not. (I don't want to reconfigure "on the fly" for each system)

For home and wired, this is a great O.S. I like it a lot. Perhaps when I get a new hard drive for the laptop (too small), I can work with someone here to get the Broadcomm wireless going, it would be a good thing to learn. It seems close to being good with the internal since it was detected.

[ziptar]

same thing happened to me but I re-installed. Wireless comes on but doesn't really work. the wifi light comes on even but I cannot connect. I'm not so concerned about it I'm going to install again in a couple days as I downloaded the DVD instead and will get it worked out.


My experience mirrored mike-chipper and michaelp exactly. I was setting up 64 Bit Ver. 9 on a Dell Latitude D630 with a Dell Wireless 1390 / Broadcom 4311 card.

kmoore134 is right about /etc/rc.conf getting toasted., I made a copy of it before trying to setup WiFi with network manager. After the kernel panic and reboot rc.conf was zero bytes. Copied the backup over and everything was fine again.

I was able to get the Dell Wireless 1390 card setup and working on my router using WPA2-Personal AES.

I may not have needed to do all of this but, WiFi has been working great all day and it's the only thing that has worked.

This is what I did basically:

Install the Broadcom bwn firmware:
1) Used Cabled NIC to connect to the network.
2) Boot up, log in as root.
3) cd /usr/ports
4) portsnap fetch
5) portsnap extract
6) cd ./net/bwn-firmware-kmod
7) make install clean

Setup Config Files Manually:

/etc/rc.config

wlans_bwn0="wlan0"
ifconfig_wlan0="WPA SYNCDHCP"

/boot/loader.conf

# wireless load
wlan_wep_load="YES"
wlan_ccmp_load="YES"
wlan_tkip_load="YES"

# Broadcom Firmware
bwn_v4_ucode_load="YES"
if_bwn_load="YES"

/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

network={
ssid="MySSID"
priority=145
scan_ssid=1
psk="MyWPAPasskey"
}


When it was al over over and working it was pretty simple actually... :)

Here is the output of ifconfig.

bwn0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 2290
ether 00:2c:74:92:u7:z9
nd6 options=21<PERFORMNUD,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet autoselect mode 11g
status: associated

wlan0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
ether 00:2c:74:92:u7:z9
inet6 fe80::22c:74ff:fe92:u7z9%wlan0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x
inet 192.168.2.5 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.2.255
nd6 options=21<PERFORMNUD,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet OFDM/54Mbps mode 11g
status: associated
ssid MySSID channel 5 (2432 MHz 11g) bssid 00:4g:90:a9:23:7b
country US authmode WPA2/802.11i privacy ON deftxkey UNDEF
TKIP 2:128-bit TKIP 3:128-bit txpower 30 bmiss 7 scanvalid 450 bgscan
bgscanintvl 300 bgscanidle 250 roam:rssi 7 roam:rate 5 protmode CTS
wme roaming MANUAL


And the output of pciconf -lv
siba_bwn0@pci0:12:0:0: class=0x028000 card=0x00071028 chip=0x431114e4 rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
vendor = 'Broadcom Corporation'
device = 'BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN'
class = network

Hope that helps someone.

[humph]

Thanks all.

Had exactly the same trashed /etc/rc.conf problem as above, three reinstalls (9.0) later and was about to give up on PC-BSD for my Lenovo S12 when I saw this post. So tried again and did all configuration manually and not with the network manager applet thing.

Now have working BCM4312 (Dev ID 4315) using ndis driver approach and WPA. (Yet to re-try bwn driver, but it's all working so well, I may not bother!).

[ziptar]

humph, good to know it worked for you! It also eliminates a a couple things.

I was thinking perhaps it was just a Dell Latitude D6xx thing, now its safe to say it isn't. Also appears to be unrelated to drivers.


mike-chipper, I was thinking. Since you take yours around allot and need to connect to different SSIDs often you might want to swap out your Broadcom card fro an Intel.

Broadcom support has never been great for Linux / BSD, you'd think by now Broadcom would release drivers even but, they don't.

I'm going to grab an Intel Mini-PCI WiFi Card out of the Laptop Graveyard at work tomorrow and try another reinstall just for grins. Let you know how it goes.

[humph]

Hi ziptar,
Well it's working, but there may be something else going on.
Related to the wpa_supplicant issue discussed elsewhere.
Still investigating, but now have new kernel w/o PC card and trahsed the /etc/pccard_ether file. Prior was often getting 2 or 3 instances of wpa_sup..and 50% CPU load on one of them. Now seems OK, but have to do a network restart after boot. If/when I get definitive closure or conclusion, I'll post back!
(Sadly my BIOS has a PCI-e card whitelist, so have to battle on with BCM)..

[mike-chipper]

Ziptar, I have thought about another network card. They aren't too expensive from Ebay. And it would give me back KDE & PC-BSD. Lots of good info came down. Thanks.

Just wondering, when to stop dumping money into an old "beater" to drag around?

[seanbruno]

Another "me too" with the trashed rc.conf nonsense.

I ended up disabling lagg failover to resolve my issues. I never saw a kernel panic, but reconfiguration of my network did fail many times and I finally figured out that disabling the failover entries and recreating my rc.conf entries succeeded in producing a reliable wireless network configurations.


wlans_iwn0="wlan0"
ifconfig_em0_ipv6="inet6 accept_rtadv"
ifconfig_em0="DHCP"
ifconfig_wlan0="WPA SYNCDHCP"

[bds]

while i don't think the install is trashing /etc/rc.conf, i can't help but think that maybe the automagic stuff that happens isn't happening quite right in my situation. maybe one of you can shed some light on this?

in my default /etc/rc.conf, i get the following:
# Auto-Enabled NICs from pc-sysinstall
ifconfig_em0="DHCP"
wlans_iwn0="wlan0"
# Auto-Enabled NICs from pc-sysinstall
ifconfig_em0_ipv6="inet6 accept_rtadv"
hostname="myHost"
ifconfig_iwn0="`ifconfig em0 ether`"
ifconfig_iwn0="ether ${ifconfig_iwn0##*ether }"
cloned_interfaces="lagg0"
ipv6_activate_all_interfaces="YES"


is it just me, or is ifconfig_iwn0 pointing towards the eth0 interface?

i'm trying to read & wrap my head around this now, but any advice would be greatly appreciated.
thanks!

[ziptar]

Ziptar, I have thought about another network card. They aren't too expensive from Ebay. And it would give me back KDE & PC-BSD. Lots of good info came down. Thanks.

Just wondering, when to stop dumping money into an old "beater" to drag around?

I brought home an Intel Pro Wireless 3945ABG card and did a fresh Install on another drive just to see how it went. It just worked.. No muss, no fuss. The auto config stuff, switching SSIDs, etc all of it was zero config.

All in all much less of a PITA than the Broadcom Card. While it might be an old beater laptop spending around ~$20 on a card to get what you want would be money well spent. Get the card, get the KDE and the PC-BSD and be happy and smile. :-) I plan on getting several years out of this D630 thanks to PC-BSD.

Whats your time and happiness worth? I spent ~2 hours futzing around with the Broadcom, I spent 0 seconds on the Intel.

Needless to saw I am keeping this setup, no interest in going back. Glad I did it, learned a couple new tricks and stiff but, no need to bang my head against it anymore.

[humph]

Seems the stability of BCM4312 (dev ID 4315) under both ndis or bwn_lp drivers is not all I had initially hoped for. Spent far too long messing around with a basic re-install of freeBSD (just in case there was anything weird due to scripts in PC-BSD), with similar unstable results. However, it does appear more stable on open WiFi networks. So far (ndis). None of the Link Up/Link Down stuff at boot.

Although, I'm using different networks for WPA vs open testing. Since can't get my mac to do internet bridge out over WiFi other than open or WEP. So it just might be due to dodgy timings or nasties related to the old D-Link router that's running WPA, and for now there's not much I can do to test that...

EDIT: Same results working into an Android phone "hot spot". ie: Open/No authentication works fine. WPA seems problematic. Not tried WEP, as the Android can use MAC address whitelist, so why bother with insecure WEP anyway ;-)
Will do some more testing of WPA mode, but seems that's where the problem is.

[keoh]

Just get linux ;)

[mike-chipper]

Ziptar: I think you are right, I ordered the Intel card, for the D600 it is WM3B2200BG Intel for the mini pci. I'll post as soon as the new hard drive and that get in and are installed.

Keoh: I've used Linux more than M.S. and found that only half the distro's can properly configure and use this broadcom card "out of the box". I want KDE on this laptop, it has the tools and setup I like, and the laptop does have good enough graphics to do things like wobbly windows. Kubuntu is broken now for most laptops, their library files apparently are different and cause distortion.

PC-BSD works very well so I'll be happy once the wireless thing is solved. Thanks all!

[mike-chipper]

I am happy to say, the new Intel wireless card worked fine, it took a reboot, but it came up first time as "associated" but did not connect on line. I found icons on the KDE desktop stopped working and have seen the misbehavior before, so I rebooted and the wireless came up instantly, update manager flagged 4 updates and now all is fine. I found an INTEL card online for under $5 so it was NOT worth the time trying to get the Broadcomm card working.

A new hard drive added too, to make this old beater into a refurbished little gem. Thanks for the help on this, good advice to trash the old card.