Baffled Newbie

[Ovcar]

Normally I've pretty good at googling problems but this time I'm stumped, although I have to admit I'm not too hot with linux. I apologise for the lenghty post, but I've always found it's better to give a bit too much info than a bit too little, and as I'm very new with bt, I probably don't know what's really relevant.

The hardware I have available to me is one Dell Vostro 1500 originally fitted with a Dell 1397 Wireless card (BCM 4322 I believe), and one Dell Latitude E4300 originally fitted with and Dell 1510 Wireless card (BCM 4312 I believe). The e4300 has a dead ethernet port, but I would really prefer to get this working as the 1500/BCM4322 is only on loan to me.

I initally tried BT5 from USB and installed on the E4300 / BCM 4322 and had no joy. I could not get it to connect to anything - iirc it kept saying incorrect password even though I knew it was correct. Tried using wicd and manually via command line, although iirc at the time I didn't realise I would need to install another package to get WPA working with command line.

Then I tried with the 1500 / BCM 4312. I managed to get this working, although when testing MITM, I had very poor results. It would work properly for all devices on the WLAN and even the LAN it was connected to, but approx 50% of pages would fail to load and needed a refresh to get them to work.

Then I tried swapping the wnic's between the laptops. Now on the 4300 / BCM4312, when I should get the login prompt I get:

btlogin: [27.652012] DRHD: handling fault status reg 2
[27.655983] DMAR:[DMA Read] Request device [0c:00:0] fault addr fffe9000
[27.655983] DMAR:[fault reason 06] PTE Read access is not set
[27.670459] b43-phy0 ERROR: Fatal DMA Error: 0x00000800, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000
[27.676833] b43-phy0 ERROR: This device does not support DMA on your system it will now be switched to PIO

My only attempt at resolving this was to upgrade the laptop BIOS from A14 to latest A24 which made no difference.

Reading around this error it appears I need to downgrade the kernel, but I'm stuck as my wired nic is dead and my wireless nic won't connect. If I try to connect wirelessly:

If I try to connect using wicd without static ip address,
with an unsecured network I see a handful of layer 3 traffic and a DHCP discover from the laptop but no DHCP reply and wicd eventually says Connection failed :unable to get ip address
with a WEP network I can see all sorts of layer 2 traffic, even DHCP discovers from the laptop but no DHCP reply or any layer 3 traffic , wicd says Connection failed : unable to get ip address,
with a WPA network I get the same,
and using WPA2 I can only see a handful of ICMPv6 in wireshark and wicd say Connection failed : bad password

If I set static ip details valid for the relevant subnet, then

With an unsecured network I can see some layer 2 traffic but wicd says Connection failed : could not contact the wireless point
with WEP I see the same
with WPA I see the same
with WPA2 I see no traffic and wicd says Connection failed : bad password

The mad thing is this wifi card worked in the vostro. If I go back to the vostro, I forgot the results but I was able to connect to some types of network but not all. From that I can conclude it's not worth trying to mess with the BCM4322, but the BCM4312 has shown it can work in the vostro but not in the latitude.

So from my brief testing/ elimination, my suspicion is the BCM4322 is not much good for backtrack, and for some reason 4322 and 4312 are not working right in Latitude E4300, although only the 4312 shows the error previously mentioned. Also as performance of the 4312 was poor, I thought I would remove a wireless nic from a reasonably recent wireless n router. In there I found a bcm94322mp2d - I believe this is a 4322. So if the 4322 is good enough to run a router with multiple clients, I'm surprised it's not doing to well for me - when I briefly tested the Vostro with the 4322 from the Latitude I also saw aroudn 50% of pages error and need to be reloaded.

If anyone has any ideas on what I may be doing wrong and how to get the Latitude behaving I would be very grateful.

Here's the output of lspci on the Latitude E4300 with BCM 4312: (I also got the dmesg info but that was way too longer than permissible in one forum post)

[spoiler]
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Memory Controller Hub (rev 07)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)
00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82567LM Gigabit Network Connection (rev 03)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 03)
00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 03)
00:1a.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 (rev 03)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 03)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev 93)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation ICH9M-E LPC Interface Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation ICH9M/M-E SATA AHCI Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03)
02:01.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 05)
02:01.1 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 22)
0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY (rev 01)

[/spoiler]

[snafu777]

Ovcar,

Thank you for posting such an elegant thread. This is the first post I have seen in a long time, where the user actually attempts to fix it himself/herself prior to asking around. And when I say you tried to fix it yourself, you even broke it down from the OSI perspective. Mad props man. Take a look at some of the posts from your peers (thread postings # wise) and you will see just what I mean. It actually angers me to read some of these posts.... Nuff said on that.

WICD is very tricky these days with BT5r2, a while back I made a thread about installing network-manager inconjunction with WICD and how to do it properly, so you could use them both (not at the same time ofc, but, if you did try, one would take the others settings, kinda neat...)... Try this out and let me know if it works for ya. Whenever WICD fidgets around with me, I pop open network manager and p00f, I get proper connectivity. If that is not the case, I would definately point my finger at yer broadcom NIC (broadcom sucks.... Hands down..)... Here it is.

[Ovcar]

Made some progress - purchased an RTL 8137 based card and replaced my 3g/wwan card with this as the slot the BCM 4312 is in wouldn't accept a full size card. Now the DMA error has vanished. The 3g card was a Dell 5530 originally made by Ericsson - seems like this was causing a conflict.

Now I'm wondering if for MITM, can I use one card to connect to the AP and the other to handle the clients? I have a funny feeling this may work a lot better but not really sure.

[Ovcar]

Update: still got a few DMA errors from time to time, found a tweak to make BCM4312 to work for a few mins but still keeps dropping.

What I did was to edit /etc/modprobe/b43.conf so it only contained:
options b43 pio=1 qos=0
changing pio from 0 to 1 didn't seem to make any difference.

Also been having fun trying to use the r8187 driver instead of the rtl8187 driver as apparently the old one let you use iwpriv highpower=1 to enable high power and I'm getting very poor results with it. Probably best to post a new thread for that.