[SOLVED] NetworkManager and slow wireless

[Vespa]

I have a laptop with an Atheros a/b/g/n wireless adapter and so far wireless has been super slow. I know it isn't my access point as I have other computers connected that work fine. Also I dual boot this laptop with Windows 7. In Windows the speed is fine. When I shut NetworkManager down and manually connect to my access point via the wpa_supplicant command, the speed is just fine. I used Fedora 14 on this laptop with NetworkManager exclusively and never had a speed issue. Any suggestions on what I could try next to speed up the connection? I use KDE, so I haven't tried NetworkManager in Gnome yet.

[vespa@qwerty3 ~]$ lspci | grep -i wireless
02:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR9287 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)

[cheesie]

I have the same problem: Wireless is slow (or unusable) ; see my bug report: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=698978

what kind of commands I can use with wpa_supplicant; so I could at least update Fedora 15?

[jvillain]

Seriously if your network is important to you learn how to do all this stuff without NetworkManager because it is a continuous train wreck. Always be ready to kill off NetworkManager and do it manually.

Have a look over here for how to do it. If you already have a connection look at section 12.

http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Documentation/iw

[Vespa]

Here is what I did:
Run the wpa_passphrase utility to create the pre-shared key section of wpa_supplicant.conf

vespa@qwerty:~/Desktop$ wpa_passphrase myessid "mypassphrase"
network={
	ssid="myessid"
	#psk="mypassphrase"
	psk=2a264c5e1a4313cfd4d2d262882cb4587d02235411bd234987a12bf0b150821a
}

Create the wpa_supplicant.conf file and paste the output above. Then add a few extra lines so it looks like below

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=wheel
network={
	ssid="myessid"
	#psk="mypassphrase"
       proto=RSN
       key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
       pairwise=CCMP TKIP
       group=CCMP TKIP 
       psk=2a264c5e1a4313cfd4d2d262882cb4587d02235411bd234987a12bf0b150821a
}

Stop NetworkManager:
systemctl stop NetworkManager.service

Then I started the supplicant:
sudo wpa_supplicant -B -Dwext -i wlan0 -c ~/wpa_supplicant.conf

To get a DHCP address, I ran:
dhclient wlan0

Most of this was adopted from this URL:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/WPA_supplicant

It worked for me just doing the steps above. It isn't a huge pain, but NetworkManager would be a lot more convenient to me. I connect to a lot of different wireless access points and it would be great if NetworkManager would just work. Plus I run fedora on another laptop for my kids. There is no way I could get them to run command line connections to wireless. They are still on Fedora 14, though, which has been flawless for me, so far as wireless goes.

[cheesie]

thanks a lot; if not fixed by a kernel update I will try it with the USB DWA-160 from D-Link; for the Wireless network adapter (Pci-express) I got the solution from my bug report:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=698978


--- Comment #7 from Jirka Klimes <jklimes@redhat.com> 2011-05-02 04:52:31 EDT ---
It appears to be a regression in ath9k driver in kernel 2.6.38. It's been fixed
in 2.6.39, I think.

You can try a workaround:
# rmmod ath9k
# modprobe ath9k nohwcrypt=1

Kernel upstream bug:
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31452

[Vespa]

Thanks cheesie. The nohwcrypt was exactly the issue.

It was immediately over 50X faster in a command line speed test:
wget -O /dev/null http://speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com...ds/test500.zip

Before: 5.98K/s eta 4h 54m
After: 332K/s eta 27m 45s

I'll use this until the kernel has the patch.

[cheesie]

according to a comment in the bugzilla it should be resolved with the last kernel update. I can't verify it at the moment as I am on vacation.