Showing posts with label wireless. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wireless. Show all posts

Monday, July 18, 2011

Workaround for Stuck Beacon Problem

Stuck beacon is a notorious problem on madwifi (the wireless driver DD-WRT used for Atheros routers).  If you never experienced any wireless interruptions with DD-WRT then just ignore this article. However, if you're annoyed by this stuck beacon problem with constantly dropping wireless connection, then I hope this can be of help.

Below is a quick hack, not a completely fix but would make life a little easier. The idea is to watch the output of dmesg and when the "stuck beacon" error messages flood, reset the wireless interface to bring it back to life.

Wireless Scheduler with Cron Job

Cron is a time-based job scheduler in Linux systems which enables users to schedule jobs (commands or shell scripts) to run periodically at certain times or dates. In this example, we'll use cron to control the wireless signal, and set it to turn on only at given time.

DD-WRT is shipped with cron support, but again we'll use our own cron daemon as it's easier for future updates and will save some flash wearing.