I have been running Ubuntu 10.10 on my HTPC for a while now without any issues. But wanting to make things as cable free as possible I have bought a TP-Link TL-WN951N wireless card - based on the AR5008 chipset. The problem with this card is that it is intermittently recognized at boot time.
Approximatively 2 out of 3 boots fail to see any wireless interfaces. Every time this happens, "lsmod" reports ath9k as being loaded and used, "lspci" lists my wireless card correctly - but all of the user space utilities fail to "see" or use the card: ifconfig / iwlist / iwconfig / rfkill / network manager etc.
Subsequent reboots will fix this issue "magically".
There is absolutely nothing useful in the logs - no errors, nothing - because the system does load the driver but somehow doesn't manage to use it.
I have tried stopping irqbalance - thought it was an irq mess up somewhere. Upgraded the kernel, tried to the latest ath9k from source, tried to pass the option of "no hardware encryption" to the module (the only option available) - nothing solved the problem.
Have any of you encountered a similar problem? Any ideas on what else to try or what to do to get more verbose debugging of the problem?
Thanks!
