Bug#478858: madwifi-source: sometimes doesn't see arp packets

[Celejar]

Package: madwifi-source
Version: 1:0.9.4~rc2-1
Severity: important

Hardware is a pci Atheros AR5215/5213 (rev 01).

My LAN has a consumer wireless AP / switch / gateway router ('gwen'),
and various hosts, including the box with the Atheros card ('edith') and
another linux box ('lizzie').   Outgoing connections from edith are
fine.  Incoming connections (e.g. ssh from lizzie) are sometimes fine,
but sometimes fail with "no route to host".  In the normal case, the arp
table on lizzie is correct; in the problem case, the entry for edith is
'incomplete'.  Pinging lizzie from edith will correctly set up lizzie's
arp table, as will manually entering edith's MAC addres into lizzie's
arp table.  Running tcpdump on edith (in the problem case) does not show
any arp communications initiating from any other clients on the network,
although it does show its own arp requests and replies to them.

I have no idea what triggers the problem; inbound connections will be
fine for a while, and then they will start failing.  Removing and
reinserting ath_pci seems to usually fix the problem.

The network is running WPA-PSK.  Googling turned up various (old)
problems similar to mine, with some speculation that WPA was implicated,
but in at least some of those cases, the arp packets showed up, albeit
in garbled form, while in my case I see no trace of the arp requests at
all [0].  I'm not sure if the problem occurs without WPA; turning off WPA
seems to often require reloading ath_pci before the system will
reconnect, and that itself seems to often solve the problem.  If
necessary, I suppose I could run the network for a while without WPA.

I'm no network expert, and I may be misdiagnosing the problem.  I will
be glad to provide additional diagnostic information at request.

[0]
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kernel-bugs/2005-November/006081.html,
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=80699,
http://madwifi.org/ticket/419,
http://hostap.epitest.fi/bugz/show_bug.cgi?id=63

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.24-lizzie
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages madwifi-source depends on:
ii  bzip2                         1.0.5-0.1  high-quality block-sorting file co
ii  debhelper                     7.0.4      helper programs for debian/rules
ii  module-assistant              0.10.11.0  tool to make module package creati

madwifi-source recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information