Troubleshooting Installation

udev & Persistent Net Rules

If after installing and rebooting/modprobing an error like the following appears:

udevd-event[7118]: rename_netif: error changing net interface name wifi0_rename to ath0: Device or resource busy

or, whilst manually creating VAPs, interface names given to wlanconfig are ignored, it means that persistent network interface renaming is being painful.

Take a look to see if /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules exists. If it does exist, and it contains a line similar to:

ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="net", SYSFS{address}=="00:11:22:33:44:55", NAME="ath0", ENV{INTERFACE_OLD}="$kernel"

Comment the line out and reboot.

Hmm. Changing that file and rebooting alone didn't do the trick as long as /etc/udev/rules.d/z45_persistent-net-generator.rules does its work and recreates the offending rules. I had to edit that file and remove ath* from the line starting with KERNEL==, change:

KERNEL=="eth*|ath*|wlan*|ra*|sta*", DRIVERS=="?*",\
        IMPORT{program}="write_net_rules $attr{address}"

to

KERNEL=="eth*|wlan*|ra*|sta*", DRIVERS=="?*",\
        IMPORT{program}="write_net_rules $attr{address}"

This will no longer create any new rules for devices names starting with ath. Also a reboot wasn't required,

/etc/init.d/udev reload

(as root) was enough.

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Known issues in Etch

The Etch standard kernel is 2.6.18, and the madwifi version is 0.92. Wireless support is constantly improving, and there are a number of issues with those versions. See the package tracking page for details.

Problems are often specific to certain models or even revisions, so they are difficult to summarize. A problem experienced by an editor is constant reassociation when using wpa_supplicant.