[Bug 34902] Re: Ralink Wireless USB/PCMCIA/PCI hangs PC

[rlancefield]

Hi all,

Running Dapper 2.6.15-26-386 on an MSI 654 Ultra  (MS-6547 v.1) with a
Matrox G550. (The mobo BIOS has not been updated since purchase.)

I installed an Asus WL-167G USB 2.0 wifi adapter (Ralink RT2500 chipset)
which initially worked fine out of the box, using default Dapper
drivers. I plugged it in, configured the network settings, and it
connected to my router without problems.

It ran flawlessly for several weeks until I decided to use the the
System > Administration > Networking tool to change the configuration
from static addressing to DHCP. I made the change, clicked OK and the
system locked up, solidly. As others have reported above, all I could do
was hard reboot.

I disabled the interface and tried to re-enable it, but doing so froze
the system (as did each subsequent attempt). The solution (for me)
turned out to be very simple. In /etc/network/interfaces I added the
statement "auto rausb0" immediately above the section for my wireless
interface. So, the wlan section in my interfaces file now looks like:

auto rausb0
iface rausb0 inet static
(... etc.)

After rebooting, the command did its job and auto-started the interface.

So far so good. Seems to be working fine and is a simple and benign fix.
Hope this proves to be helpful to someone.

-- 
Ralink Wireless USB/PCMCIA/PCI hangs PC
https://launchpad.net/bugs/34902