Comment 61 for bug 34902

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ed_p (edpizzi) wrote : Re: Ralink Wireless USB/PCMCIA/PCI hangs PC

Oh, more information, for those more interested in getting their card working than in fixing kernel bugs:

I was able to get my card up by properly configuring /etc/network/interfaces manually, in the standard Ubuntu kernels, with DHCP. I can get exactly one "ifup" command through per reboot. You can also do one "ifdown" afterwards. However, on the second "ifup" the system panic's. I think the wizard does several ip-down steps, which triggers the panic. The end of my /etc/network/interfaces file, where I added wireless configs, looks like this:

iface rausb0 inet dhcp
wireless-essid <your ssid>
wireless-key <your WEP key>

*Don't* declare your interface "auto" in /etc/network/interfaces, since that tells automatic processes that they can up/down that interface, which will panic your kernel.

I have a simple script that checks if i've ever up'ed the card (by reading the ESSID from iwconfig), and only up's it once, and that is in my startup scripts:

is_wlan_up=$(iwconfig 2>/dev/null | grep '^rausb0' | sed -e 's/^.*ESSID://' | cut -d\" -f2)

[ "$is_wlan_up" ] || ifup rausb0

That was sufficient to get my D-Link DWL-g122 USB card (rt2500 based) working with Ubuntu. My network basically works at this point, but I'm curious to poke around a bit more to see what's wong.