urtwn intermittent failure. NetBSD 10 amd64 install.

kc9udx

I have one that does this, and it also is urtwn. Mine overheats, and after cooling down, it works again. I don't know if that's what's happening to yours though.

anarchosax

kc9udx Thanks for the reply. Interesting. I don’t know if the situation has changed for the better with NetBSD 10, but this is the only USB WiFi dongle that I could find at the time, that was available for purchase near me and worked with NetBSD 9.3. I wouldn’t object to purchasing an alternative, but I don’t like spending money for something that in the end doesn’t work with NetBSD…

kc9udx

I wonder if it's one of those really tiny ones that only sticks out of the USB socket about ¼". My overheating one is, and I assume it overheats because it doesn't have much surface area exposed to air. If I run it in a different port where there's better heat sinking, it doesn't seem to overheat at all.
I'll see if I can dig up the information for the ones I have. I haven't noticed any change between 9. x and 10.0.

Here is one that works but doesn't overheat.

Here is one that works but does seem to overheat (situation dependant).

anarchosax

kc9udx The tp link tl-wn722n that you suggested arrived today, but it doesn't register at all on my system when I run ifconfig. Sooo I am back on my old urtwn0 usb device.

Edit ---

Hmm. I tried plugging the tl-wn722n adapter into to my computer again, this time in the front USB port. Interestingly, both dmesg and ifconfig registered the device without any problem. Not sure exactly what is going on, but I believe that it has something to do with the crowded area where the USB ports are located on the back of the computer. Or… possibly the total power load on the USB ports in the back.

rvp

anarchosax I have crappy WiFi HW too (think it's actually a BIOS issue...), and even on Linux I have to do something like this when it wedges:

ifconfig urtwn0 down;  sleep 10;; ifconfig urtwn0 up

anarchosax

rvp What is the "authorized” way to either register a new network device or re-register a network device on NetBSD? I have had to switch between a wired connection and a wireless connection to test my USB dongles. When switching between the connections, I have been unable to use ifconfig re0 up or urtwn0 up. Instead, I have used sysinst, however there is no persistence after a shutdown or reboot.

This doesn't appear to be covered in the ifconfig man page...

rvp

anarchosax What is the "authorized” way to either register a new network device or re-register a network device on NetBSD?

As long as the kernel's recognized the HW, dhcpcd should pickup & configure the addresses correctly. Or, you could explicitly tell it to configure particular interfaces:

$ fgrep dhcpcd_flags /etc/rc.conf
dhcpcd_flags="-4Mqw vioif0 ure0"
$

That'll assign only IPv4 addresses to first the vioif0 IF; and if that doesn't exist, try the ure0 IF.
Single-shot static address assignment is also pretty simple (and standard):

# ifconfig vioif0 down
# ifconfig ure0 192.168.68.171 up
# route add default 192.168.68.1

anarchosax This doesn't appear to be covered in the ifconfig man page...

See afterboot(8) and ifconfig.if(5) to see how to make these settings persist.

There might even be some way to do automatic switchovers (non-DHCP), but, I haven't experimented with this...

wravoc

For me this ended up being a standby, C state, power problem in the BIOS to the USB port.

rvp

wravoc Very interesting--would never have considered this. Can you please elaborate?

wravoc

Sure, I noticed the Edimax N150 urtwn0 blue activity light would go off round the same time on 90% of OS installs. Therefore not OS specfiic, although RHEL (implemented different Intell Q77 drivers?) did not, Windows did not, but nearly every Linux and BSD did.

Removing the USB WiFI device and re-plugging, would initiate a connection. Network inspection showed nothing odd other than the drop-off/wedge.

I had a low profile/power system at 240v, measured everything, switched to lower voltage GPU cards (35w AMD RX 550 2GB LP or AMD RX 550 4GB LP 43w on some OS) instead of 50w for PCIe bus max nVidia P1000 47w, T1000 50w, AMD 6400 50w), disabled some USB ports, then in Dell BIOS disabled C state manipulation and enabled "block sleep" and it hasn't failed yet.

wravoc

Oh also I forgot, this may be important or not, because I did it as a power "set" and didn't test that setting alone. I disabled the internal mobo NIC as well and plan to get a Intel PWLA-8391-GT PRO/1000 GT Desktop, Single Port, PCI, Network Adapter, 5W.