Atheros Wireless PCI card (AR5413) causing random crashes

[Henning Kulander]

My desktop computer has a Wireless Network card with an Atheros chipset reported as AR5413 by lspci. The computer looses connection at random times, and the computer crashes about twice a week on average.

I use the default driver selected by Ubuntu. Is there an alternative driver I could try to see if that works better, and maybe the fix for this bug would be selecting that driver by default instead of the one I'm running now.

I'm using Ubuntu 8.10 with all updates installed.

Here's the output from lspci:
02:01.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5413 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)

Output from dmesg:
[ 14.794254] ath_hal: module license 'Proprietary' taints kernel.
[ 14.820349] ath_hal: 0.9.18.0 (AR5210, AR5211, AR5212, RF5111, RF5112, RF2413, RF5413)
[ 15.214750] ath_pci: 0.9.4
[ 15.214782] ath_pci 0000:02:01.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17
[ 15.925223] ath_rate_sample: 1.2 (0.9.4)
[ 54.500007] ath0: no IPv6 routers present

I see a lot of messages like this in /var/log/messages: Don't know if it's relevant:
Mar 7 20:31:28 snakepit kernel: [65182.535453] rix 13878 (118) bad ratekbps 0 mode 1

Version of package:
ii linux-restricted-modules-2.6.27-11-generic 2.6.27-11.16 Non-free Linux kernel modules for version 2.

I'm attaching two pictures of monitor with crashlog.

Running kernel:
Linux snakepit 2.6.27-11-generic #1 SMP Thu Jan 29 19:24:39 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux