# ral0: could not read from BBP



## ClaytonL (Jun 8, 2009)

Hey everyone, I'm having some troubles with a Ralink PCMCIA wifi card. I'm definitely not that experienced with FreeBSD, but I'll give a quick rundown of my problem. Ifconfig ral0 up list scan gives me a whole bunch of lines of "ral0: could not read from BBP" followed by one line of "ral0: timeout waiting for BBP". I'm not sure what that means at all, but I get the same thing if I try to scan with airodump-ng. I know the channel/ssid of the router I'd like to connect to, so I've also tried ifconfig ral0 ssid linksys channel 11, then dhclient ral0, but I get no link.

I'm running almost a clean install. I've added hald_enable="YES" and dbus_enable="YES" added to my rc.conf file. I don't think that could make a difference with my problem, it doesn't seem to anyways, but its needed for me get mouse/keyboard in X. I'm new to FreeBSD so I felt I should mention that. I apologize if this problem has already been solved, but I couldn't seem to find anything about it.


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## richardpl (Jun 8, 2009)

Something is blocking ral(4) to properly work with card.
For start try to disable hald and see if that helps.


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## ClaytonL (Jun 8, 2009)

Alright now I can scan with airodump-ng and sometimes ifconfig ral0 up list scan works. Not often though. Airodump doesn't see networks as well as it was under Linux, and the lights on my network card are both constantly on (with or without hald). If I do find a network with airodump, and set my card to the same channel and ssid (it always takes the ssid, but appears to be going through channels still), dhclient either says no link then gives up, or says DHCPDISCOVER on ral0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7 (or 4,5,6, then goes up to higher numbers), then fails. I just went to the other room to try again, and it worked. Wow! I've tried many many other times, but this time it worked. Is it possible that the driver is really really bad? That might explain the bad range and what seems to be random behavior. Or am I a noob and don't get it?


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## richardpl (Jun 9, 2009)

Ralink drivers (ral,rum,ural) are missing some magic ...


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## ClaytonL (Jun 9, 2009)

Dang. Oh well. I'll just go back to what works for me. Thanks


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