Comment 9 for bug 63886

This is half a "me too" sorta comment. I've an IBM T43p with an Atheros chip built in, here's the lspci output:

04:02.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)
        Subsystem: IBM Unknown device 057e
        Flags: bus master, fast Back2Back, medium devsel, latency 168, IRQ 58
        Memory at a8400000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
        Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2

The device worked just fine in dapper, where I used network manager to connect to wireless networks with no problems. However, when upgrading to edgy, I've noticed many more problems specifically, I've noticed the following behaviors:

1. I am unable to connect to many wireless networks. These networks will show up in NetworkManager as having a reasonable signal strength, but not allow me to associate. NetworkManager keeps on trying to associate with the network. In general I've only noticed this on unencrypted networks, but that's probably because I only connect to one encrypted network (my home).

2. Those networks I can connect to frequently see dropped connections. I have my access point on one corner of my desk, about 3 feet from my laptop. With dapper I had maybe one dropped connection in six months. With Edgy I get a dropped connection about every 10 minutes (on bad days). On weaker networks its even worse, making the network basically unusable.

I have noticed a few changes, I now have a wifi0 and ath0 interface. wifi0 shows no wireless extensions when I run iwconfig. It also has a very strange hardware address:

wifi0 Link encap:UNSPEC HWaddr 00-16-CE-20-80-9D-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00

According to my system logs, this should be a wireless interface for me, and it even says that I've got 802.11/a/b/g on it. Nothing of the sort shows up for ath0 in my log or dmesg.

I also see some strange lines in my system log related to the interface when running network-manager:

Oct 13 19:46:46 localhost kernel: [17211313.984000] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): ath0: link becomes ready
Oct 13 19:47:16 localhost dhcdbd: message_handler: message handler not found under /com/redhat/dhcp/ath0 for sub-path ath0.dbus.get.host_name
Oct 13 19:47:16 localhost dhcdbd: message_handler: message handler not found under /com/redhat/dhcp/ath0 for sub-path ath0.dbus.get.nis_domain
Oct 13 19:47:16 localhost dhcdbd: message_handler: message handler not found under /com/redhat/dhcp/ath0 for sub-path ath0.dbus.get.nis_servers
Oct 13 19:52:30 localhost kernel: [17211658.552000] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): ath0: link is not ready

Not sure how relevant those are, but I hope this can help someone.