[IdOp]

Originally Posted by vanGrimoire

I forget exactly which tools, but linux usually has something you can poke the device with. If the storage on the card is faulty and or it works on linux you've narrowed things down a bit.

Hi and thanks for replying . That's a good idea, I should have a look for such tools and see if there are any I haven't installed.

FreeBSD might be preferable to linux too, I don't know.

It wouldn't be something I'd consider, but that's just me!

Is it the hardware?

Good question too. As mentioned, the device does work under Linux (Slackware 14.0). But ... the card was refurbished when I bought it, and there is a little bit of funkyness worth mention. To scout the network neighbourhood, I use airodump-ng. In that program, with the Netgear/Atheros device, the ESSID (or network name) sometimes gets corrupted with random characters. (Other than that it works great, and was under $10, so not worth returning.)

So what's causing that random bug? I doubt it's airodump-ng, since it doesn't happen with other wireless devices I used. It could very well be a bug in the Linux ath9k driver. Or it could be a bug in the hardware. But, even if so, the device otherwise works which indicates that the firmware is getting loaded. (Note to self: try to load the OpenBSD firmware under Linux.)

The other thing I should do is search the OpenBSD mailing lists about this (I'd sorta assumed google might pick them up, but maybe not.)

ADDED: The following is from the Linux dmesg, indicating firmware htc_9271.fw is loaded (the file size in this case is 51272 bytes):

[   12.555628] usb 1-1.4: ath9k_htc: Transferred FW: htc_9271.fw, size: 51272
[   12.799589] ath9k_htc 1-1.4:1.0: ath9k_htc: HTC initialized with 33 credits
[   13.231526] ath9k_htc 1-1.4:1.0: ath9k_htc: FW Version: 1.3
[   13.231634] ath: EEPROM regdomain: 0x60
[   13.231639] ath: EEPROM indicates we should expect a direct regpair map
[   13.231656] ath: Country alpha2 being used: 00
[   13.231661] ath: Regpair used: 0x60
[   13.235546] ieee80211 phy0: Atheros AR9271 Rev:1
[   13.241914] Registered led device: ath9k_htc-phy0
[   13.241935] usb 1-1.4: ath9k_htc: USB layer initialized
[   13.243799] usbcore: registered new interface driver ath9k_htc