Arch Linux

dscaife

Member

Registered: 2007-10-25

Posts: 3

Wireless constantly disconnects

Hey guys, I'm beginning to tear my hair out over this. I have a computer that's connected to my network through wireless, and up until a few days ago (perhaps a week), it worked with relatively few hitches. However, lately the wireless has just been deciding to give up once or twice a day.

It can't ping the router or anything until I do an /etc/rc.d/network restart, at which point pinging will work. Well, it will work for a few seconds, then it will give up again, and despite anything I've tried, this will continue until I reboot the machine. Occasionally, pinging will start complaining about buffer space. I looked that up and the first thing I saw said something about shared IRQ's, and it appeared to be sharing IRQ 11 with a few things so I went into the BIOS and now (as far as I can tell) it isn't sharing an IRQ. Out of desperation of something to try I even updated the router's firmware to the latest available, but I guess it seems most likely to be an issue with that computer itself.

The machine uses ndiswrapper and wpa-supplicant with the WG311v3 drivers (it's a Netgear wireless PCI card with the Marvell 88w8335 chipset). I'm about to try disabling the WPA encryption and trying WEP instead, but I'm not holding my breath for anything seeing as it seems to work just fine a lot of the time.

Any help or suggestions of things I could try would be appreciated. I'd also be glad to post whatever log files you want to see.

Thanks.

test1000

Member

Registered: 2005-04-03

Posts: 834

Re: Wireless constantly disconnects

try downgrading ndiswrapper and/or using different windows driverfiles.

---

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.:B:.

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2006-11-26

Posts: 5,819

Website

Re: Wireless constantly disconnects

Did you recently upgrade your kernel? Maybe the "irqpoll" option would help when added to the "kernel" line in Grub's config.

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dscaife

Member

Registered: 2007-10-25

Posts: 3

Re: Wireless constantly disconnects

Thanks for these suggestions I'm going to try them out and see how it goes... it might be a while before I can really be certain if anything's worked though.

Cheers

sykesm

Member

From: Reading, UK

Registered: 2006-09-03

Posts: 70

Re: Wireless constantly disconnects

Also having newtork startup issues since upgrading to "CORE DUMP", man, talk about tempting fate. I'm using module "bcm43xx". Tried adding to kernel line as suggested above, plus settings up using iwconfig as this usualy get's me up and running, no joy. Then tried /etc/rc.d/network stop, then again with start. Up everything came. Not sure what is a consistant solution yet, I'll feed back here when I know. One thing I did notice was a mysterious IP address seemed to be picked up by KWIFImanager; I uses DHCP,  and this was not being allocated or seen by my router(DHCP) mechanism.

iphitus

Forum Fellow

From: Melbourne, Australia

Registered: 2004-10-09

Posts: 4,927

Re: Wireless constantly disconnects

ok... at a console.

First check: are you associated with the network?

an associated network typically looks like this:

iphitus@laptop:~$ iwconfig ipw0
ipw0      IEEE 802.11b  ESSID:"iphitus"  Nickname:"ipw2100"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412 GHz  Access Point: 00:16:33:33:33:33

Second check: Do you have an IP? Easy to get from ifconfig

iphitus@laptop:~$ ifconfig ipw0
ipw0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:04:23:87:6A:92  
          inet addr:192.168.1.118  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
....

If those two are fine, then it's something else... possibly reception or a network misconfiguration. I've had a problem or two since coredump as well... so do this one for me:

route

It *should* return immediately. If it takes 10 seconds... then you've got the same problem I've been having. Try using dhclient instead of dhcpcd and see i that fixes it. There's a new dhcpcd out soon/today, that may also fix it.

James

sykesm

Member

From: Reading, UK

Registered: 2006-09-03

Posts: 70

Re: Wireless constantly disconnects

OK.. switched off and started from scratch, started with no connection and ran

[sykesm@plamuk etc]$ iwconfig eth0
eth0      IEEE 802.11b/g  ESSID:"XYXYYXX"  Nickname:"Broadcom 4306"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency=2.437 GHz  Access Point: Invalid
-------------
[sykesm@plamuk etc]$ ifconfig eth0
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:12:17:94:4E:58
          inet addr:169.254.88.29  Bcast:169.254.255.255  Mask:255.255.0.0
------------
[sykesm@plamuk etc]$ route
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
169.254.0.0     *               255.255.0.0     U     0      0        0 eth0

then ran

sudo /etc/rc.d/network stop
sudo /etc/rc.d/network start
iwconfig eth0 essid XXYYXXXZZZ
iwconfig eth0 key 22keySS
dhcpcd -n eth0

and then

[sykesm@plamuk etc]$ iwconfig eth0
eth0      IEEE 802.11b/g  ESSID:"XXYYXXXZZZ"  Nickname:"Broadcom 4306"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency=2.437 GHz  Access Point: 00:12:17:E7:42:E6
--------------------------
[sykesm@plamuk etc]$ ifconfig eth0
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:12:17:94:4E:58
          inet addr:192.168.1.101  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0

puzzling me are, ¨Access point: Invalid¨ and the strange IP address that it starts up with.

I hope Iḿ not hijacking this thread and that the questions are relavent to the original query.

thanks
mark

iphitus

Forum Fellow

From: Melbourne, Australia

Registered: 2004-10-09

Posts: 4,927

Re: Wireless constantly disconnects

The strange IP address is what dhcpcd does when it can't get one, it gets an automatic zeroconf one, which generally doesn't really do much at all.

How are you using the network scripts to set the wireless settings?

sykesm

Member

From: Reading, UK

Registered: 2006-09-03

Posts: 70

Re: Wireless constantly disconnects

Just noticed another thread on this topic, seems other people are experiencing problems

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=39372
================================
my problems have been resolved. I am no longer running knetworkmanager
and boot straight into kdemod via kdm, weather applet refreshing itśelf immediately.
I think there is a timeing issue whereby arch does not see my network card, router when first starting the the newtork

Added the following script which is the only real change.
in /etc/profile.d

more net_up.sh
sudo iwconfig eth0 essid xyessidxy
sudo iwconfig eth0 key 596key566

and my rc.config looks like

lo="lo 127.0.0.1"
INTERFACES=(lo eth0 !eth1)
eth0="dhcp"
gateway="default gw 192.168.1.1"
ROUTES=(!gateway)

and in conf.d/wireless

wlan_eth0="eth0 mode managed essid xyessidxy key 596key566"
WLAN_INTERFACES=(eth0)

also in conf.d/dhcpcd

DHCPCD_ARGS="-R -N -t 30 -h $HOSTNAME"

and lastly my daemons line in rc.conf

DAEMONS=(syslog-ng hal fam crond @network @httpd @hwd @ntpd @mpd @alsad @hplip @cups !postgresql)

Last edited by sykesm (2007-11-03 14:37:51)