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Excessive "Invalid misc"??

I am running linux 2.4.29 with ndiswrapper around the windows wireless card driver.

Things work good. But when I run "iwconfig wlan0", I get what seem to be excessive "Invalid misc". For example, the system has been up for 28 minutes, and I get the following

iwconfig wlan0

wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"xxxxx" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.457 GHz Access Point: Bit Rate:54 Mb/s Tx-Power:25 dBm RTS thr:2347 B Fragment thr:2346 B Power Management:off Link Quality:100/100 Signal level:-61 dBm Noise level:-256 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:275 Invalid misc:114879 Missed beacon:0

Is this overly strange? Is it something I should worry about? Or would it just be the 2.4Ghz telephones which I have around the house creating some invalid packets?

Any information would be appreciated.

Reply to
Stephen Jenuth
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114,000 misc errors might be normal if its a small percentage of total traffic or if you're in an interference infested environment.

Dive into the proc file system and see what it calls "misc". This one is running HostAP so it might be somewhat different from yours. I don't have a Linux client system handy.

# iwconfig wlan0

wlan0 IEEE 802.11b ESSID:"GetLost" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437GHz Access Point: 00:40:05:ca:e0:42 Bit Rate:11Mb/s Sensitivity=1/3 Retry min limit:8 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:(deleted) Security mode:restricted Power Management:off Link Quality:48/70 Signal level:-45 dBm Noise level:-90 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:5 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:7 Invalid misc:7601 Missed beacon:0

# cd /proc/net/hostap/wlan0 # cat stats

TxUnicastFrames=12315 TxMulticastframes=0 TxFragments=14779 TxUnicastOctets=2145645 TxMulticastOctets=0 TxDeferredTransmissions=3001 TxSingleRetryFrames=211 TxMultipleRetryFrames=80 TxRetryLimitExceeded=4 TxDiscards=0 RxUnicastFrames=5784 RxMulticastFrames=137125 RxFragments=151843 RxUnicastOctets=8811129 RxMulticastOctets=7904751 RxFCSErrors=7603 RxDiscardsNoBuffer=11 TxDiscardsWrongSA=0 RxDiscardsWEPUndecryptable=5 RxMessageInMsgFragments=0 RxMessageInBadMsgFragments=0

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Its now been up 24 hours.

# cat stats signal_level=-41 dBm tx_frames=77565 tx_multicast_frames=4 tx_failed=0 tx_retry=1903 tx_multi_rerty=422 tx_rtss_success=0 tx_rtss_fail=0 ack_fail=2562 frame_duplicates=60 rx_frames=0 rx_multicast_frames=1520204 fcs_errors=2639360

It looks like there are a loarge number of fcs_errors.

However, the connection seems to work pretty good. Is there something I should be looking for?

Reply to
Stephen Jenuth

fcs_errors are packets received with CRC errors. That's usually caused by some form of interference with co-channel users.

Please don't truncate the /proc/.../wlan0 output.

If you're using wireless tools, try the following incantations and see if there's anything displayed that's useful. iwconfig ( iwspy (link quality per node) iwlist (list of connected devices with speed, errors, etc) iwpriv (permissions)

How many megabloats per second thruput is "pretty good"? Numbers, not vague prose.

Methinks you might get better answers in a Linux specific wireless group, forum, BLOG, or mailing list.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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