Topic: Are 20,000 retried packets per hour normal?

After having the chumby up for a few hours (and about 8 feet away from the wireless AP), the wireless status screen shows the following.  Do all the "excessive retries" and "invalid misc" mean anything, or is that normal operation?  If it matters, we sometimes see the chumby show a blank (but on) screen (i.e. no widgets displaying) even though the chumby is up (can be pinged, webserver keeps updating wireless status, can bring the control panel up).


wlan0     802.11b/g NIC  ESSID:"[deleted by me]" 
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.432GHz  Access Point: XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX 
          Bit Rate:11Mb/s   
          Retry:off   RTS thr=2432 B   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:93/100  Signal level:98/100  Noise level:7/100
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:62378  Invalid misc:4751   Missed beacon:0


Inter-| sta-|   Quality        |   Discarded packets               | Missed
face | tus | link level noise |  nwid  crypt   frag  retry   misc | beacon
wlan0: 0000   93    98     7        0      0      0  62378   4753

Re: Are 20,000 retried packets per hour normal?

That's most likely because the server is still under heavy load and you're getting timeouts.

The black screen is while it's downloading widgets, which it appears is unsuccessful.

We're upgrading our servers this week, so hopefully this issue will be gone soon.

We had built our system around providing the service to the couple hundred prototype chumbys - we were simply not prepared to be blogged all over the planet and our server reduced to smoldering slag.

It's also possible we're seeing some kind of issue with range on the wifi dongle.  We're looking into that.

Re: Are 20,000 retried packets per hour normal?

If it helps at all, all the test units we've had display a similar retry count. We're currently not sure if that's just a driver bug or real. Based on what I've seen so far I'm more inclined to think it's a bug. That level of retrying should be pretty disastrous for a link.

7BAA 2E53 01C1 DCFF 497B  E7F0 9699 A303 78F0 D9B9