improved wifi reliability using the iwl3945 module

[frankausmtank]

Hey there,
I found the following hint on smolts.org ( http://www.smolts.org/smolt-wiki/pci/80 ... /8086/1011 ) and it worked perfectly for me, so it might be valuable for someone else too..

Disabling hardware scanning on my intel 3945 card greatly improved speed and reliability when scanning for and connecting to wireless networks. Before, network-manager had huge troubles to find anything and I often had to specify the SSID manually.

To disable hardware scanning, the module iwl3945 needs to be loaded with the parameter

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disable_hw_scan=1

.

In order to do that, just add (as root) a new file to /etc/modprobe.d (I called it iwldisablehwscan.conf , but any other name should work too), containing only

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# Disable HW scanning
options iwl3945 disable_hw_scan=1

.
After reboot (unloading and reloading the module should work too), hardware scanning will be disabled and everything should work fine.
You can check the parameters the module was loaded with by looking at the files in /sys/module/iwl3945/parameters/ . The file "disable_hw_scan" should contain a "1" now.

This worked for me on a fedora 12 install, but since I had the same problems on ubuntu 8.04 (using iwl3945 too), it should also be helpful for ubuntu users. The paths might differ from what I've written here, but the procedure should be the same, essentially.