Wireless dropouts

My Flukso FLM02A is dropping its wireless link after a few days and refusing to re-establish the link without a power cycle. As it's currently in the meter box, WiFi signals are listed as between 15/70 and 19/70 (i.e. quite low).

Is the dropout a known issue? Am I going to have to connect up to the ethernet port and scrape some logs, and if so what commands should I run or what log entries should I be looking for?

FYI my WiFi AP is a Fritz!Box 7390. I have no wireless connectivity issues on the other devices in the house, and there are no other networks on the same Radio Channel as me (at least there aren't when I check the Access Point to see if somebody is stomping on my channel).

mozreactor's picture

Same problem here.

For me it occurs rarely, maybe once a month (just after it lulls me into a false sense of security of being bulletproof).

WiFi strength is around 27/70 as I'm using a high-gain antenna instead of the itty bitty one supplied.

My Flukso also requires a power cycle to reconnect.

It makes me sad. I'd really love to get this worked out.

Kaldek's picture

Righto so I'm going to need to wait for the problem to occur and then make sure I have my laptop handy to plugin to the wired port to pull some Linux log info out of it.

Still would like some advice on what data to look for though...

Worst case I suppose I just reboot it using cron every week.

Kaldek's picture

Well I decided to wire up the house to support Ethernet mode. I suppose in a few days we'll find out if Ethernet also drops out like wireless does.

mozreactor's picture

I await your results with interest. Not planning on wiring the house with cat6 until NBN comes my way, within year supposedly, but I won't hold my breath.

icarus75's picture

Up until now, all FLM firmware releases used madwifi as a wifi driver. The driver is known to have a couple of deficiencies. Since madwifi relies on a binary HAL blob from Atheros, it's not straightforward to pinpoint the root cause of a wifi connectivity issue, much less even to fix it. The good news is that a new, fully open source driver has been written from scratch. It's now considered 'production ready'. From commit be2f15 onwards, the FLM02 development branch is based on OpenWRT Attitude Ajustment 12.09.1 using ath5k as a wifi driver. This concretely means the next firmware release will contain the new driver and will hopefully make your FLM truly bullet proof. If you're interested in taking a pre-release version for a spin, just shout. Please note that you should be comfortable ssh'ing into an FLM to be eligible for a pre-release upgrade.

Cheers
/Bart

mozreactor's picture

Great work! How long until the new version is live? I'm happy to try out the pre-release.
Mat.

login as: root
root@flukso.mozreactor.net's password:

BusyBox v1.15.3 (2013-05-19 23:43:26 CEST) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

_______ __ __
| ___| |.--.--.| |--.-----.-----.
| ___| || | || <|__ --| _ |
|___| |__||_____||__|__|_____|_____|
C O M M U N I T Y M E T E R I N G

OpenWRT Backfire [10.03.1, r27608]
Flukso [2.2.3-1, c286ff55f3904c92]

------------------------------------------
Chuck Norris doesn't need a smart meter.
He just grabs the mains every hour to get
a feel for his electricity consumption.
------------------------------------------

icarus75's picture

@mozreactor You've passed the test. I've just upgraded your FLM to alpha firmware release 231. I appreciate any feedback you might have.

Kaldek's picture

Well folks, Ethernet mode has been rock solid.

mozreactor's picture

@icarus75 Lol. Thanks. I'll keep an eye on it. I noticed this morning that from about 20:45 last night to 05:00 (UTC+10) it dropped out, but it obviously came back up by itself. Probably just the upgrade kicking in?

beadybee's picture

While I have always had problems with wireless dropouts, a reset has usually fixed it - hence the 122 resets in 3.5 years :( Recently the system has had periods when it has not been uploading data even when the heartbeat shows it is still connected. Note I have an early model Flukso so maybe I should consider upgrading the hardware?
Any clues?
Thanks,
BDB

bramcloet's picture

Hello,

I'm also having the same problems. 9d20h ago I had to power cycle the Flukso when I came back from holidays. Today its again offline. Last hartbeat was at 01 Oct 2013 15:29:02. I'm also willing to test the pre-release.

icarus75's picture

@mozreactor There was still a bug in the migration script, causing an FLM misconfiguration after migration. Hence the drop-out. This is now fixed.
@beadybee You're running an FLM01. We don't have firmware upgrades for this version. Due to memory constraints an FLM01 cannot be upgraded remotely. Sorry.
@bramcloet Your FLM will be upgraded to r231-alpha at 10:37CET.

beadybee's picture

Does this mean the FLM01 is now beyond its use by date?
Thanks.

mozreactor's picture

@Icarus75 I have been testing firmware 231 for 82 days uptime without a hiccough. I'd call that bullet proof enough.

However I see you've bumped up to 232 in the meantime. Is there anything I should be aware of in upgrading from the 231 beta?

Regards,
Mat.

Juljon's picture

I have just found this old thread due to a similar problem. Assume I'm using FLM 02. Any updates on the connectivity issues?

gebhardm's picture

@Juljon: Have you checked for an update in the device settings? Navigationtab: Cogwheel -> Device; if you are not on v2.3.2 already there should be an update available that you need to trigger yourself.

Juljon's picture

@Gebhardm: Done it lets see how it goes. Thanks for the advice.