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Forum Discussion
RAX40 wifi problems
I am trying to use a device that has a espressif wifi module. Every time this device attempts to connect to the wifi it kills the entire wifi subsystem. Looking around the net it looks like espressif...
TechGuyLeo34 wrote:I am trying to use a device that has a espressif wifi module. Every time this device attempts to connect to the wifi it kills the entire wifi subsystem. Looking around the net it looks like espressif wifi modules have issues connecting with netgear units among a few different kinds of routers.
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I have 2 different asus routers that show kernel panic when I attempt to connect and those devices freeze up. The RAX40 doesn't freeze up but the whole wifi sub system goes offline for several seconds before it recovers.
No vendor system integrator like Asus or Netgear does fully control the software (microcode, firmware, ...) that runs on the effective radio chip - each of these had it's own code, which is typically loaded as part of the drivers in place If this code does crash or misbehave, there are typically some wachdogs which are able to restart this processing on the radio modules. If there is a bad device, these radios should not crash, however everything is on a very short life cycle, and especially for the consumer market, the effort spent is not the same as what is used for the typically more expensive radio devices used in more expensive business class APs.
TechGuyLeo34 wrote:Has anyone seen this behavior before where they attempt to connect a device it kills the wifi sub system?
Many years using and deploying small and large scale wireless infrastructure. Problems like these happened a few times.
TechGuyLeo34 wrote:If so what have you done to fix it? Or is it something that the device connecting needs to be fixed?
Typically both sides have to work - the makers of the wireless STA bringing things down, as well as the radio makers (Broadcom, Qualcomm, Inhell, ...).
Needless to say, the vendor/maker of your IoJ should take responsibility and ensure the best possible compatibility.
Trouble is with the very brief description "a device that has a espressif wifi module" is not very good, so it might be difficult to buy some of these units to test.
Your reply was actually what I expected. So the device is a supplement dispenser. They are a new start up company attempting to be game changers. Being young they made mistakes most people companies do. They left defaults and didn't properly vet their devices for trouble. Thus how I found out they use a wifi soc module from a company called espressif. I couldn't get more information unless I broke into the device which I didn't want to do. But based on the information I have this is what I can provide. I have no more to offer up.
The device appears to act as both a router and a device. What I mean is you can actually find the device on the wifi list click on it and the phone for example connects to the device. This connection between device and phone works perfectly.
You use their app to configure their device to connect to the router that's when the problem happens.
Digging through Asus system logs that asus makes avaliable. It literally states kernel panic when the device attempts a handshack. Stating wlan0 tsmanagerrecipient.c fatal error. I can see that something happen that cause the OS to panic on the device when the dispenser attempted to connect.
I see the panic message happen 3 more times before the entire device becomes frozen and unresponsive due to os kernel failing completely. Only a power cycle fixes this on the asus side.
Netgear does not offer the same level of logging that asus equipments do. Netgear only provides very high level and basic logs. For the every day users and not network administrators like myself. So I have no idea what the os is doing in the background when the device attempts to connect.
The difference is that the ausus freeze completely where as the netgear only fails the wifi. And the watchdog recovers it. It does this 4 times then I believe it gives out a fatal error on the wifi because the watchdog quits recovering the wifi sub system.
I opened this discussion because it's interesting to me it's the first time ever that I've experiences such an out coming of connecting a new device. And being a student of learning I'm always curious to find out why what happened...happened.
I work with network devices, monitoring of infrstrature, etc. day in and day out and I've seen my share of interesting things on large corporate environments. But nothing like this. And was just curious to see if anyone possibly had an answer. If not... no problem. I get it.