General Questions

Hi there,
I have a fairly large deployment of M0n0Wall boxes running various wireless links in a large wireless network that I help manage.  We have a lot of custom timings in the boxes that are covering various link distances, and it seems like over time, the values change, so we have to run the following commands on each box to get performance back up on the wireless link:

Code:

sysctl dev.ath.1.slottime=52
sysctl dev.ath.1.acktimeout=107
sysctl dev.ath.1.ctstimeout=107

Is there any way to keep those values from auto-adjusting, or reverting, or changing after we set them?

Thanks in advance!

I believe You're looking for this:
http://doc.m0n0.ch/handbook/faq-hiddenopts.html

There is explanation on the location of injecting additional XML tags and data inside them, within the config file manually by using a text editor.

----
...
system/earlyshellcmd and system/shellcmd

may contain a shell command that is executed before the boot scripts actually start setting up the system (for earlyshellcmd), or after the boot scripts have finished setting up the system (for shellcmd). You can have multiple (early)shellcmd tags. Don't forget to replace special characters with their XML equivalents (most notably < and > (&lt; and &gt;).
...
----

So it would be:
----
<system>
<shellcmd>command</shellcmd>
</system>
----

Or in Your case i suppose:
----
...
<system>
     <shellcmd>sysctl dev.ath.1.slottime=52</shellcmd>
     <shellcmd>sysctl dev.ath.1.acktimeout=107</shellcmd>
     <shellcmd>sysctl dev.ath.1.ctstimeout=107</shellcmd>
</system>
...
----

Be very careful when editing directly the config file, and always keep a clean backup before You try to do anything.

Thanks for the informative reply, but we never reboot the machines unless we absolutely have to.  Also, we are already setting those parameters at boot time in the config.  It seems like the values change when the unit is running, as if the driver is trying to auto-adjust the timings or something.

You could make a shell script that sets the values periodically and does that by running in a loop and sleeping ttl cycle period.
You could add that script in the m0n0 image, set execution rights and initiate it on startup with the XML.