Weird WLAN problem after stupid upgrade attempt

Fri Jan 4 05:37:10 EST 2008

I have managed to turn what was a working G1G1 machine into a machine  
which can no longer see it's wireless card on the USB bus.  I thought  
I caused this to happen with the following software gyrations, but it  
is quite possible that I am the victim of an unfortunately timed and  
entirely coincidental hardware failure.  If anyone has any pointers to  
help me figure out which of those two is the case - I will be  
eternally grateful (or at least grateful for a really really long time  
indistinguishable from eternity :) ).

The stupid part is how I started on this little odyssey of mine. I  
stupidly tried to just run "olpc-update joyride-1492" from the command  
line without having a developer key.  The update process appeared to  
run fine (which one could argue it should NOT have done if it wasn't  
going to work later), but when the machine rebooted I got the "boot  
failed" screen.  Realizing that I probably _needed_ that whole  
developer key thing, I attempted to give up on this ill-fated upgrade  
by doing the "circle key" boot from the alternate OS image.

When doing the circle key reboot, the machine rebooted fine, except I  
had no networking.  No lights, no nothing. After some irrelevant  
silliness on my part where I didn't check the $path variable but  
started freaking out that ifconfig couldn't be found, I decided what I  
needed was a fresh install to get everything back to the way it was so  
I could continue to sit in my corner with the shipping version of the  
software and avoid the joyride that I was clearly not qualified to be  
on.

Thus, I found the wiki page about downloading the os653.img and fs.zip  
files, I threw those on a USB stick, and did the "all buttons, I  
really really mean it" reboot.  The reflash proceeded without a hitch.  
The machine restarted, had lost the things I had downloaded and it's  
nickname (as expected), but alas - still no network.

At this point, I dug in to the exact situation as best I could.  I  
noticed a "eth0 no private ioctls" message during startup, which lead  
me to this old ticket  http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/1969 .  That  
ticket describes exactly what I have going on, in so far as the  
wireless card has apparently disappeared.

Having a second, working G1G1 machine, I was able to determine that  
normally there are 3 devices listed in /proc/bus/usb/devices on a  
working machine.  On my broken machine I only have 2.  Also, the  
usb8xxx and 802.11 modules aren't loaded - but that's not surprising  
if the usb device wasn't found as the kernel loaded.

Looking in /var/log/messages from my good machine I see the following  
during a _good_working_ boot.

Jan  4 17:59:56 localhost kernel: [   19.120404] hub 1-0:1.0: USB hub  
found
Jan  4 17:59:56 localhost kernel: [   19.120730] hub 1-0:1.0: 4 ports  
detected
Jan  4 17:59:56 localhost kernel: [   19.244457] ohci_hcd 0000:00:0f. 
4: OHCI Host Controller
Jan  4 17:59:56 localhost kernel: [   19.269021] ohci_hcd 0000:00:0f. 
4: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 2
Jan  4 17:59:56 localhost kernel: [   19.285507] ohci_hcd 0000:00:0f. 
4: irq 10, io mem 0xfe01a000
Jan  4 17:59:56 localhost kernel: [   19.404162] usb usb2:  
configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Jan  4 17:59:56 localhost kernel: [   19.428806] hub 2-0:1.0: USB hub  
found
Jan  4 17:59:56 localhost kernel: [   19.444807] hub 2-0:1.0: 4 ports  
detected
<-- Same up to here -->
Jan  4 17:59:56 localhost kernel: [   19.460720] hub_port_wait_reset:  
portstatus=503 portchange=10
Jan  4 17:59:56 localhost kernel: [   19.533567] usb 1-1: new high  
speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
Jan  4 17:59:56 localhost kernel: [   19.580477] Initializing USB Mass  
Storage driver...
Jan  4 17:59:56 localhost kernel: [   19.610342] hub_port_wait_reset:  
portstatus=503 portchange=10
Jan  4 17:59:56 localhost kernel: [   19.720163] usb 1-1:  
configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Jan  4 17:59:56 localhost kernel: [   19.752491] usbcore: registered  
new interface driver usb-storage
Jan  4 17:59:56 localhost kernel: [   19.768864] USB Mass Storage  
support registered.
Jan  4 17:59:56 localhost kernel: [   19.799984] usbcore: registered  
new interface driver libusual

 From the nasty bad broken machine, in this same area of kernel  
messages I see the following :

Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   19.035283] hub 1-0:1.0: USB hub  
found
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   19.035610] hub 1-0:1.0: 4 ports  
detected
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   19.165439] ohci_hcd 0000:00:0f. 
4: OHCI Host Controller
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   19.188479] ohci_hcd 0000:00:0f. 
4: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 2
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   19.204928] ohci_hcd 0000:00:0f. 
4: irq 10, io mem 0xfe01a000
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   19.319481] usb usb2:  
configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   19.344145] hub 2-0:1.0: USB hub  
found
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   19.360104] hub 2-0:1.0: 4 ports  
detected
<-- Same up to here -->
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   19.398669] hub_port_wait_reset:  
portstatus=501 portchange=10
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   19.478184] hub_port_wait_reset:  
portstatus=100 portchange=1
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   19.493707] hub_port_wait_reset:  
device went away!
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   19.509760] Initializing USB Mass  
Storage driver...
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   19.747667] hub_port_wait_reset:  
portstatus=103 portchange=10
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   19.824322] usb 2-1: new full  
speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 2
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   19.927321] hub_port_wait_reset:  
portstatus=103 portchange=10
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   20.007386] usb 2-1: device  
descriptor read/64, error -62
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   20.217309] hub_port_wait_reset:  
portstatus=103 portchange=10
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   20.298350] usb 2-1: device  
descriptor read/64, error -62
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   20.507786] hub_port_wait_reset:  
portstatus=103 portchange=10
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   20.587363] usb 2-1: new full  
speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 3
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   20.687441] hub_port_wait_reset:  
portstatus=103 portchange=10
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   20.767505] usb 2-1: device  
descriptor read/64, error -62
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   20.987681] hub_port_wait_reset:  
portstatus=103 portchange=10
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   21.068233] usb 2-1: device  
descriptor read/64, error -62
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   21.278157] hub_port_wait_reset:  
portstatus=103 portchange=10
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   21.357247] usb 2-1: new full  
speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 4
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   21.795150] usb 2-1: device not  
accepting address 4, error -62
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   21.887425] hub_port_wait_reset:  
portstatus=103 portchange=10
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   21.967003] usb 2-1: new full  
speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 5
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   22.406370] usb 2-1: device not  
accepting address 5, error -62
<-- Basically the same after here, except for the no-workie part -->
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   22.423247] usbcore: registered  
new interface driver usb-storage
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   22.439931] USB Mass Storage  
support registered.
Jan  4 18:00:12 localhost kernel: [   22.464870] usbcore: registered  
new interface driver libusual

As you can see from the above, the broken machine gives some  
hub_port_wait_reset business that the working machine didn't do -  
making me suspect a hardware issue.

Another thing I have done is run the POST diagnostics by holding the  
left rocker button during boot.  I did this on both machines at the  
same time to diff the results.  Both say that usb port 0 is in use -  
good.  But the working machine did scroll some wlan diagnostic  
information up the screen at the end of the the video tests that the  
broken machine did not do.  The broken machine did not report an error  
- but it clearly did not run the same wlan test.

After some consultation on IRC and general flinging anything I could  
against the issue I did try upgrading to the '07 firmware just for  
grins.  No different results (which is what the release notes would  
lead me to suspect). I also tried going back to the 650 software  
instead of 653, but again, no different results.

So I'm sorry for everyone on this developers list who aren't really  
terribly interested in my specific, probably hardware related,  
silliness. Given that it sure _feels_ like I managed to effectively  
brick my machine by just running update scripts that shouldn't brick  
my machine, I thought I would ask for opinions, guidance, or general  
flames about what I'm overlooking.

I have submitted my developer key request by now, and tomorrow should  
be able to get to the Ok prompt.  Until then, I don't know as that I  
can do anything else.  If no one has any good ideas for me to try, it  
looks like I may have to RMA this puppy next week.

That makes me sad, but I knew there was a reason I ordered 2 of these  
suckers to begin with....

										(-: Tom ;-)