[Madwifi-users] trouble with acktimeout?

[Thorsten v. E. <tv...@vo...>]

I'm trying to set-up a 6km link and I seem to have trouble with the ACK 
timeout setting. I have atheros 5212 radios on both ends, and am running on 
linux 2.4.26 using wlan: 0.8.4.3, ath_hal: 0.9.12.5, ath_rate_onoe: 1.0, 
and ath_pci: 0.9.4.6.

What I observe is that every packet generates 10 retries and gets logged as 
error due to excessive retries, but it actually get through. So if I run a 
ping I get almost no packet loss, and an ssh connection works very 
smoothly. Bandwidth is another matter as the rate control negotiates down 
to 1Mbps and all the retries clog up the air. Signal quality is around 20 
(dB) on both ends, so that also indicates I'm not having an RF problem. I 
did run atctrl -d 10000 to set the acktimeout and ctstimeout (rts and frag 
are off) to 89us and the slot time gets set to 43us. I can verify that by 
reading from /proc/sys/dev/ath0/*.

So, what am I missing? How can I troubleshoot this? The code to set/get the 
acktimeout in the driver is pretty trivial, so unless the HAL screws up, 
that should work properly. Is there any debug level I should use to see 
more details about what the driver pushes into the DMA queue? Or is there 
something else I'm missig?

Thanks much!
	Thorsten