Hi all,
I bought a wireless network card RT2561/RT61 rev B 802.11g last week for my amd64 debian squeeze machine. I plugged the card in, installed firmware-ralink (via wired connection), modprobed for rt61pci, and sat back watching the shiny new connection and gloating at the easiest install of hardware I have ever had.
I duly moved the pc to a room with no wired capability, and network manager (running under gnome) detected and connected me to the wap netgear with a not bad signal.
A few hours later, the connection suddenly went down. All efforts to ifupdown wlan0 or stop and start network manager failed to connect again, with dmesg reporting "wlan0: deauthenticating from <blah> by local choice (reason=3)". Only a reboot seemed to sort it, and then only for a short while. Oh yes - I also got some ridiculous ping times for the gateway, even though the signal was fairly strong, which reduced to a sensible amount when I succeeded finally in quashing the wired interface eth0.
I've come back after a week away, however, and it won't connect at all. syslog reports "rt61pci firmware: requesting rt2561.bin" , modinfo rt61pci shows a bunch of useful stuff that assures me it is all loaded. It can't be a firmware issue, surely, as it worked at first? I just keep being told "ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan0: link is not ready"
Neither giving wlan0 a fixed IP in interfaces, or telling it to request an address from a dhcp server makes any difference. (The request for an address isn't even getting as far as the dhcp server).
I'm stumped - any suggestions where to look for clues? I did read it could be a clash between udev and network manager, I also have no idea whether invoking iwconfig and iwlist scan makes any difference. I'm sure I've tried every combination possible by now.
Thanks, sorry if this isn't very clear, I've been going in circles for so long I think I've forgotten where I began.
Jenny