# [PC-BSD] Wireless brings the system down



## fnucc (Jan 6, 2012)

Howdy, 

I did three installs in two days. The recipe is always the same: When wireless card loses connection with router, the first touch brings the system down. Configure wlan0, entering password for the router, restarting network... system goes to reboot and that's it. FreeBSD wakes up in, I believe, default form, even the keyboard is different. 

Since PC-BSD forum is of no use at all, maybe somebody here knows why D-Link DWL-G510 is so dangerous for the system? I'm using 9.0 and crash happens no matter which DM is up.


----------



## wblock@ (Jan 6, 2012)

It's not necessary to reinstall after a crash.  fsck(8) the filesystems and boot.
`# fsck -t ufs -y`
`# exit`


----------



## fnucc (Jan 6, 2012)

Thanks, I'll try that. However, it's not fun taking care of every step, being afraid that the systems will go down if you press something.


----------



## wblock@ (Jan 7, 2012)

What driver does the D-Link use?  Does a wired connection work?


----------



## fnucc (Jan 7, 2012)

Driver is obviously generic from kernel since the system recognized the card. Everything is fine while the connection works; when it goes down I must not touch the wlan0.


----------



## wblock@ (Jan 7, 2012)

```
an(4)
ath(4)
bwi(4)
bwn(4)
ipw(4)
iwi(4)
iwn(4)
malo(4)
mwl(4)
ral(4)
rum(4)
run(4)
uath(4)
upgt(4)
urtw(4)
wpi(4)
zyd(4)
```

These are all available as native drivers.  There are probably more in ports.  The reason I asked is that some are more solid than others.  bwi(4)/bwn(4) might work fine or not at all, depending on hardware (Broadcom is not very generous on programming details).  ath(4) works well for the cards it supports.  ural(4) and urtw(4) have worked well for me (although I've only had one or two devices to try).  Mixed success with ipw(4), but it was old hardware.


----------



## fnucc (Jan 7, 2012)

I'm just reading some Windows forums because Win 7 doesn't want to install drivers for it and it seems that I can be lucky that it works with FreeBSD  I'm going to play around with drivers to see which one will work best with rt61 chipset. It's also interesting that some other cards with the same chipset are working fine and D-Link may have some problems. I'm going to switch now from W7 back to FreeBSD to play a bit.

Update: I found something very interesting, I don't know is it a bug. After the install, if I click Configure wlan0 I can enter router password and it's working. However, if I hover the mouse over wireless icon and the router name show up I must not click on it and enter password - the system is going down. So, "Configure wlan0" - OK, right click on the icon, click on "dlink" - the system is going down.


----------

