# rt2500 card "broken" after mac address change

## raphy

Hello everyone,

Yesterday I was playing with my r2500 wifi card, and i tried to change the mac address. Unfortunately, after that, it didn't work anymore, even after a reload.

Sometimes it will have its original address, somtimes its mac address will be 00:00:00:00:00:00. 

There is no error messages at all, but when i tried to connect to my AP, iwconfig shows that i'm not associated, or that associated with a link quality of 0/100.

I tried to reinstall the driver (serial monkey one), but without success.

Currently, I'm using this same card with ndiswrapper with the original mac address, so obviously the card is fine.

Does anyone ever had this problem? The ndiswrapper module has poor performance, I would be glad if I could use the serial monkey driver again?

Here is what the relevant part of the dmesg looks like:

 *Quote:*   

> rt2500 0000:01:08.0: PCI INT A -> Link[APC1] -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16                                                               
> 
> rt2500: 1.1.0 CVS CVS Release http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com
> 
> rt2500: Info - Mac address changed to: 00:21:00:81:93:c3.                                                                                   
> ...

 

As you can see, a strange thing happen when I try to change the mac address: after that, if i reload the module, its alias change. I try a lot of different mac addresses, and it keeps giving new aliases. And if I pick a mac address previously used, it will choose the alias also previously used with this mac address. So there must be some sort of memory of these changes, but I can find them anywhere on my system.

Any idea is welcome  :Smile: 

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## Malvineous

You've probably got udev configured to treat different MAC addresses as different cards, which is why you get the aliases (maybe this is the default, it used to be the only reliable way to distinguish between different network cards.)  They're not actually aliases, they're completely different cards (so make sure you're using the right one for whatever MAC address you have active at the time.

I would have thought that unloading the driver before changing the MAC address would remove the alias.  At any rate if you unload the driver, set it back to its original MAC, then load the module again, you should end up with ra0 working...maybe there's more than one module you need to reload?

At any rate it sounds like a restart would put everything back to normal...

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## raphy

 *Malvineous wrote:*   

> You've probably got udev configured to treat different MAC addresses as different cards, which is why you get the aliases (maybe this is the default, it used to be the only reliable way to distinguish between different network cards.)  They're not actually aliases, they're completely different cards (so make sure you're using the right one for whatever MAC address you have active at the time.
> 
> I would have thought that unloading the driver before changing the MAC address would remove the alias.  At any rate if you unload the driver, set it back to its original MAC, then load the module again, you should end up with ra0 working...maybe there's more than one module you need to reload?
> 
> At any rate it sounds like a restart would put everything back to normal...

 

Indeed, it was in the udev rules configuration that the mac addresses was registered. I erased all the stuff about any network card in /etc/udev/rules/70-persistent-net.rules, reboot, but still, the wifi card doesn't work (no error message in dmesg, but with /etc/init.d/net.ra0, I get a  *Quote:*   

> failed to configure wireless for ra0

  (something like that).

Does someone has a card with a rt2500 chipset and use SerialMonkey driver? Can you tell me what your /etc/udev/rules/70-persistant-net.rules looks like?

Thank you very much

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## NeddySeagoon

dafirewallfucker,

Look at ifconfig -a to see if you have several wireless interfaces?

Its quite possible you are trying to start one with no hardware and no config information in /etc/conf.d/net.

Also, the serialmonkey driver has been adopted into the kernel and works well from kernel 2.6.25.

Lastly, may I encourage you to make a post in this thread

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## raphy

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> dafirewallfucker,
> 
> Look at ifconfig -a to see if you have several wireless interfaces?
> 
> Its quite possible you are trying to start one with no hardware and no config information in /etc/conf.d/net.

 

There is always just one wireless raX loaded at a time. I can make a "ifconfig raX up", sometimes configure the essid with iwconfig, but never get associated with any access point.

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> Also, the serialmonkey driver has been adopted into the kernel and works well from kernel 2.6.25.

 

Yes, and sorry for that, but the one in the kernel sucks (very slow connection that get stuck after a few minutes) :/

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> Lastly, may I encourage you to make a post in this thread

 

Done  :Smile: 

Thanks for your help.

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## NeddySeagoon

raphy,

Thanks for the nick change.

I use the ralink rt73, which is a USB chip set and find the kernel driver is fine.

Its been getting better since kernel 2.6.25, faster, better txpower management and so on.

Try the latest kernel.

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## raphy

I am on the 2.6.28 kernel, and the driver for 2500 is really unusable (the connection has to be restarted every 10 minutes). The ndiswrapper works a little better.

By the way, I tried to use a ubuntu livecd which seems to have the  serial monkey driver, and the problem was about the same. So there's something in the wifi card that is changed and prevent the serialmonkey driver to work properly. I'm giving up on finding what, I guess I'm stuck for the ndiswrapper module until I have enough money to buy a new wifi card  :Very Happy: 

Bye

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