Can't start wireless automatically with ath5k on F9

[carmichaelprice]

After an upgrade to 2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686 in March, my Atheros wireless stopped working. (It had previously run without a hitch for 9 months). Anyway, I finally got around to working on it today and using the "WiFi misery" thread managed to consistently get it to start manually via these steps:

• ifconfig wlan0 up
• iwconfig wlan0 essid netname key xxxxxxxxxxxxx
• click on "activate" in network device control (gives error msg, but works)

During boot-up, I get "Invalid argument" errors for "SET MODE", "SET BIT RATE", and "SET ENCODE".

Currently NetworkManager service is disabled, but when enabled doesn't seem to change any of the above.

I'd like to get back to automatically coming up wireless, if possible.

Thanks to Library Eye and especially Scottro for working through much of this earlier.

[carmichaelprice]

Ok, so the "Set Encode" error seemed to be caused by a string modifier added to my /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/keys-wlan0 file.

Was: KEY=s:xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xx
Now: KEY=xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xx

After this change, the connection booted up with the other two errors, but worked.

The "Set Bit Rate" error seemed to be caused by invalid data in my /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0 file.

Was: RATE='54 Mb/s'
Now: RATE=54M

To clear the SET MODE error, I tried:

Was: MODE=Auto
Now: MODE=auto

No effect, I still get this error.

I tried deleting and re-adding the wireless network connection in NetworkManager, but it doesn't recognize the connection, even when it is up and actually causes Firefox to default into "Work-Offline" mode if it's running when Firefox starts.

man page for iwconfig and sysconfig.txt in /usr/share/doc/initscripts-* were invaluable so far.

So now for more research on NetworkManager and why I get this ^&** invalid argument for Set Mode. Any pointers would still be appreciated.....

[carmichaelprice]

I've got it about as close as I'm going to get it, I guess.

In the network-config app, I erased the SSID and Key values, switching Network name to "Auto" option. I also unchecked the "Activate device when computer starts" option.

Now, there are no errors shown on the "console" during boot-up (although an error is logged in /var/log/messages about there being no SSID).

NetworkManager now has control and connects automatically on user login (which is as it should be for me).

So it seems like all I needed to do was get the "Key" issue straightened out and get network-config out of NetworkManager's way.

Doesn't sound like it should be designed this way, but what the hell, it's working.

BTW, why does NetworkManager only offer "Infrastructure" & "Ad-hoc" as modes, while gconf offers "Auto", "Ad-hoc", "Managed", and "Master"?
Only "Ad-hoc" and "Managed" don't give errors when ifcfg runs during start-up!