Akemi Yagi wrote:
> 2009/4/8 Urs Beyerle <[log in to unmask]>:
>   
>> Hi,
>>
>> I can just confirm that atheros wifi and WPA is broken on 2.6.18-128.1.1.el5
>> kernel or later at least on one of my systems.
>>
>> The "problem" seems to be that Redhat has added ath5k.ko in
>> 2.6.18-128.1.1.el5 kernel. ath5k.ko was not yet there in 2.6.18-128.el5 and
>> older kernels.
>>
>> At the moment I don't know why it's not working. As far as I see,
>> wpa_supplicant is not working with ath5k driver. And per default ath5k is
>> loaded even if madwifi is installed. Or you get even a mix of loaded ath
>> modules. See
>>
>> /sbin/lsmod | grep ath
>>
>> However, if I disable/remove ath5k.ko, madwifi is still not working???
>>     
>
> There is a CentOS wiki article on the Atheros AR5007EG card.  I don't
> know if this is related, but there is some chance that the info on
> that page might help.
>
> http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Laptops/WirelessAR5007EG
>
> It basically tells you to replace the current madwifi with the newer
> version (from source), and blacklist ath5k.
>
> Akemi
>   

Thanks for the link.

I just tried the latest madwifi snapshot and blacklist ath5k. But I had 
no success :-(

So I started from scratch.

Since ath5k driver should make madwifi obsolete and it's now in the RHEL 
kernel, I removed all madwifi related RPMs from my SL53 system.

Disabled wpa_supplicant with "chkconfig wpa_supplicant off" - 
NetworkManager will start wpa_supplicant.

Afterwards I configure the wireless network adapter with 
"system-config-network" by removing the old wireless adapter entry and I 
add a new wireless device (wlan0). This should create a file 
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0
TYPE=Wireless
DEVICE=wlan0
HWADDR=
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
NETMASK=
DHCP_HOSTNAME=
IPADDR=
....

And I had to manually correct /etc/modprobe.conf by adding the line

alias wlan0 ath5k

remove "alias wlan0 ath_pci"

Reboot and now I can connect to my WPA WLAN access point again! :-)

There is one drawback, if I shutdown/stop NetworkManager I get a kernel 
panic :-(

Nevertheless I hope in case ath5k works nicely, madwifi on SL5 will be 
obsolete.

    Urs