Symbol Spectrum24 CF works with Ethereal, AirSnort

[snax]

Ian,

I have known of the problem of things locking up after a while in 
hopping mode, you may well be onto something and I will take a look as 
well.  And, yes the orinoco 8.10 firmware exhibits similar problems, 
captures about 20 packets and stops, but this happens even when I wish 
to monitor only one channel and don't do any channel changing at all.

Snax

Ian Goldberg wrote:
> On Fri, 2002-06-28 at 12:07, Ian Goldberg wrote:
> 
>>I had done the equivalent thing with the 0.3.3 version of your driver
>>and the orinoco 0.11 patch, and found that it did work, but only for
>>about a minute.  Then it would stop receiving packets for some reason.
> 
> 
> OK, I've started tracking down this problem.
> 
> The packet flow stoppage (hereinafter, "badness") happens more often if
> orinono_hopper's interval setting is lower.  [orinoco_hopper basically
> does:
> 
> while(1) {
>   iwpriv eth0 monitor 2 $chan
>   usleep(interval)
>   chan = (chan % numchans) + 1
> }
> ]
> 
> My guess is that the badness happens if the iwpriv monitor ioctl happens
> at just the wrong time.  Maybe a locking issue?  I notice that the
> monitor call does orinoco_lock_user() while the interrupt handler for
> packet reception does orinoco_lock().  [This makes sense, of course.]
> These two routines do the right thing if invoked concurrently?
> 
> I also note that the iwpriv monitor ioctl does quite a bit of work,
> including turning on RFMonitor mode, *even* if it was on before, and
> we're just changing the channel.
> 
> I think if I get a bit of time this weekend, I'll do something like make
> "iwpriv eth0 monitor 3 x" set the monitor channel to x by calling
> 
>   hermes_write_wordrec(hw, USER_BAP, HERMES_RID_CNF_CHANNEL, channel);
> 
> and not doing a whole lot of the other work.  [I guess I'll make sure
> that monitor mode is in fact on in the first place.]  Then
> orinoco_hopper could do "iwpriv eth0 monitor 2 1" to begin with, and
> then a bunch of "iwpric eth0 monitor 3 x"'s.
> 
> If the problem is that the *firmware/chipset* has sensitive timing
> issues involving enabling RFMonitor mode (which I could belive), then
> perhaps just setting the channel and not continually calling
> 
>   hermes_docmd_wait(hw,
>     HERMES_CMD_MONITOR | (HERMES_MONITOR_ENABLE << 8), 0, &resp);
> 
> may prevent the badness from happening.  But this is at this point just
> a guess.  If anyone has any other ideas about this, please let me know.
> 
> [On a side note, I seem to remember the Orinoco 8.10 firmware exhibited
> similar problems.  Maybe it's the same issue?]
> 
>    - Ian
> 
> .
>