[sf-lug] WiFi problem

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

>      Then I tried modprobe ath5k which denied the possibility of the
> action even from root.

Bobbie, you in general do a very attentive and diligent job of reporting
symptoms when seeking online help, and should be commended for that. 
It's often really frustrating to try to help newcomers because they
haplessly post their guesses and vague descriptions rather than the raw
diagnostic data that other people need in order to help them.

That bit about 'denied the possibility of the action even from root'
would be an example of something that's, I'm sure, as precise as your
recollection of something detailed and technical will permit, but at the
same time uselessly vague.

For years, I wondered why users persisted on posting things like that,
then it finally occurred to me:  Most people don't keep verbatim records
of problems as the symptoms occur, and thus after the fact the best they
can do is describe what happened from memory.  So, they end up saying
things like 'denied the possibility of the action even from root'.

I have couple of suggestions that may help going forward.  One is to
keep a composition book or legal pad where you write notes about what
happens to a system, as it happens -- anything you think worthy of
note, to whatever depth of detail you think might be useful later.

The other thing is, as you work at a system's shell prompt attempting to
solve a problem, you can and should copy and paste relevant details into
an ASCII text editor in another window.  Save that text file, copy it to
a USB flash drive, then you can quote from it in your postings to places
like here asking for help and comments.

Within a single shell session, you can alternatively use  the 'script'
command, which opens a subshell and then logs all terminal activity into
an ASCII session file, default name 'typescript', which gets closed
whenever you do 'exit' or 'Ctrl-D' to close the subshell.

Doing one or the other of those things when you're having future
problems will definitely help others help you.


About your specific recent problem, on the one hand it's A Very Good
Thing that blowing away and reinstalling made your problem go away.
OTOH, you see, it would had significant long-term value for you to have
understood what the problem was and what was causing it.


One other suggestion of probable long-term usefulness:  It's often handy
to boot a cutting-edge recent live-CD distro and let it autodetect your
hardware, and then run 'lsmod | more' to see what drivers it used.
Doing this with a live CD allows you to see what a working driver
solution looks like without having to install anything.