Broadcom-wl channel 11 issue

Question

Hi,
I'm an Arch-noob and I'm having a really hard time configuring my macbook 5.1 to be able to access my company's WPA network on channel 13,which is perfectly legal/normal here , our "headquarters" are based in the Netherlands.
I hope this post doesn't collide to much with https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=111554 but that seems to focus mainly on stability issues of another driver and not so much on the channel >11 issue.
After having installed Arch and configured my wifi card following this wiki (thanks for providing such clear instructions Arch-community!):
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Broadcom_wireless
I have been provided with 11/13th of the functionality I need.
Joining networks that are in the 1-11 channel range is not a problem whatsoever. My Arch install is perfectly able to join all networks except for the ones that are on channel 13 (haven't come across any channel 12 WAP's that I know of yet). Joining channel >11 is no issue whatsoever on the same laptop (macbook for all apple-boys out there) running OSX 10.6.x and Windows 7 (which I both dislike and rather not use). These problems are becoming a little humiliating to endure, my co-workers (apple-fanboys :S) are making fun of me every morning when I connect my cat5e cable. Any help wiping the (somewhat justified...) smirk from their faces would be greatly appreciated!
Some information about my hardware / software:
lspci -v | grep Broadcom :
03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4322 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller (rev 01)
uname -a
Linux Sting 2.6.39-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Sat Jul 9 14:57:41 CEST 2011 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P7350 @ 2.00GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
lsmod | grep -E "wl|802|b43|ssb":
lib80211_crypt_tkip 8546 0
wl 2527048 0
lib80211 4198 2 lib80211_crypt_tkip,wl
iwlist eth0 channel:
eth0 20 channels in total; available frequencies :
Channel 01 : 2.412 GHz
Channel 02 : 2.417 GHz
Channel 03 : 2.422 GHz
Channel 04 : 2.427 GHz
Channel 05 : 2.432 GHz
Channel 06 : 2.437 GHz
Channel 07 : 2.442 GHz
Channel 08 : 2.447 GHz
Channel 09 : 2.452 GHz
Channel 10 : 2.457 GHz
Channel 11 : 2.462 GHz
Channel 36 : 5.18 GHz
Channel 40 : 5.2 GHz
Channel 44 : 5.22 GHz
Channel 48 : 5.24 GHz
Channel 149 : 5.745 GHz
Channel 153 : 5.765 GHz
Channel 157 : 5.785 GHz
Channel 161 : 5.805 GHz
Channel 165 : 5.825 GHz
Current Channel:1
Steps I have already taken trying to resolve this issue:
1 First i added this line to my /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf:
options cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom=EU
and these lines to my /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist43.conf (should not matter, my wireless works fine except for channels 12/13):
blacklist b43
blacklist ssb
Rebooted: no channel 13.
2 I followed the advice in the "Wireless Setup" wiki and installed the "crda" package. I added wireless-regdom to the "DAEMONS" line in my rc.conf:
DAEMONS=(syslog-ng network netfs dbus hal wireless-regdom crond networkmanager)
I uncommented my country in /etc/conf.d/wireless-regdom.
cat /etc/conf.d/wireless-regdom | grep NL
WIRELESS_REGDOM="NL"
Contents /lib/udev/rules.d/85-regulatory.rules:
KERNEL=="regulatory*", ACTION=="change", SUBSYSTEM=="platform", RUN+="/sbin/crda"
ACTION=="add" SUBSYSTEM=="module", DEVPATH=="/module/cfg80211", RUN+="/etc/rc.d/wireless-regdom start >/dev/null"
This does not seem to work.... If I execute crda manually (after rebooting ofc):
/sbin/crda
COUNTRY environment variable not set.
If I try to set the $COUNTRY manually in my shell (bash):
export COUNTRY="NL"
/sbin/crda
nl80211 not found.
3 I tried manually setting the area in which I live:
iw reg set NL
nl80211 not found.
The nl80211 comment led me to believe that I had to use iwconfig instead, so:
iwconfig eth1 channel 11
Yey! seems to work but:
iwconfig eth1 channel 12
Error for wireless request "Set Frequency" (8B04) :
SET failed on device eth1 ; Invalid argument.
4 I had a look at wpa_supplicant: they do seem to have some settings that set location:
cat /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf | grep -i country
# Country code
# The ISO/IEC alpha2 country code for the country in which this device is
country=NL
but I am under the impression that this only works if you are actually able to “see” the ssid's you want to join using network-manager or “iwlist eth1 scanning” .
5 I am quite deperate now; any help / pointers would be greatly appreciated!
Last edited by fux (2011-08-11 01:54:49)

Answer 1

according to the documentation those channels are disabled by default:
This generation of chips contain additional regulatory support independent of
the driver. The devices use a single worldwide regulatory domain, with channels
12-14 (2.4 GHz band) and channels 52-64 and 100-140 (5 GHz band) restricted to
passive operation. Transmission on those channels is suppressed until
appropriate other traffic is observed on those channels.
Within the driver, we use the ficticious country code "X2" to represent this
worldwide regulatory domain. There is currently no interface to configure a
different domain.
you could try to enable them in the C code and recompile the drivers:
[root@minos:~/linux-next-a694cb1/sys]% grep -n X2 wlc_channel.c
487: "X2", LOCALES(i, 11, bn, 11n)}, /* Worldwide RoW 2 */
638: strncpy(country_abbrev, "X2", sizeof(country_abbrev) - 1);
647: strncpy(wlc->autocountry_default, "X2", WLC_CNTRY_BUF_SZ - 1);
[root@minos:~/linux-next-a694cb1/sys]%
where i would suggest changing 'X2' with 'EU' or 'NL
[root@minos:~/linux-next-a694cb1/sys]% sed -i '' 's/X2/EU/g' wlc_channel.c