Arch Linux

got_milk?

Member

Registered: 2009-08-19

Posts: 3

Wireless woes

Hi everyone.

I've recently put Arch on my laptop a few weeks ago, and I love it. It is by far the best distribution I have used. However, there's an issue that's been plaguing me for a bit now - with wireless (what else?)

The card is an Intel WiFi Link 5100. I'm running Arch 2.6.30 kernel, and using the latest iwlwifi-5000-ucode driver. Router is a D-Link DIR-655. I have no problems in Windows, but when I use Arch the connection drops periodically, as in I can't connect to anything. Happens no matter what it seems, I can be streaming video, downloading and updating via pacman, or I can walk away from it fine and come back 5 minutes later to not connect. If I disconnect and reconnect NetworkManager doesn't connect, and usually requires me to quickly reboot to solve the problem.

iwconfig shows connection at 60mbps, and the router status shows anywhere from 120mbps to 270mbps, varying a lot (Windows was a lot more static, always hovering around 270mbps).

Here's the trick: I went in the router for laughs and set the connection to 802.11g only - solves the problem. Router pings also drop significantly - on N/G they were ~2.5ms, on G only they fell to ~0.4ms.

Going to do some trial and error and play around with N only and 20/40MHz spectrums. I'll post my results in case it helps identify the issue.

I've enabled the testing repo and I just grabbed kernel 2.6.30-5 - but I don't think it will solve any woes as the iwlwifi-5000-ucode has always been the same version.

Any suggestions for me to try? If anybody need outputs of something post the command and I will post back the output.

Peasantoid

Member

Registered: 2009-04-26

Posts: 928

Website

Re: Wireless woes

Perhaps the driver's support draft-n support is crap? (If that sort of thing is even in driverspace. I know diddly-squat about drivers.)

As a temporary workaround, you can stick with 802.11g, although your throughput will of course be lower.

got_milk?

Member

Registered: 2009-08-19

Posts: 3

Re: Wireless woes

Perhaps the driver's support draft-n support is crap? (If that sort of thing is even in driverspace. I know diddly-squat about drivers.)

As a temporary workaround, you can stick with 802.11g, although your throughput will of course be lower.

Wow, that was fast!

I've seen other Arch users use N fine on the 5000 series, plus the driver is made by Intel, as far as I know. It would be a bit embarrassing to see terrible N support on their own N chip.

Seems like all N signals, even on N only and 20MHz only have this issue. Wireless G/B work okay. I'd like to have the extra throughput though as I move a lot of large files between machines and do entire backups to my NAS.

Keveam

Member

From: St. Louis, MO

Registered: 2009-04-03

Posts: 30

Re: Wireless woes

Hello. I was having the same problem you were with the 2.6.29 and 2.6.30 kernels. The remedy:

# pacman -Sy crda

# someeditor /etc/conf.d/wireless-regdom

You should see a good amount of countries listed by abbreviation. Uncomment the line with your country. Then, add the "wireless-regdom" daemon located in /etc/rc.d/ to your daemon list in rc.conf

Hope this helps!

got_milk?

Member

Registered: 2009-08-19

Posts: 3

Re: Wireless woes

Hello. I was having the same problem you were with the 2.6.29 and 2.6.30 kernels. The remedy:

# pacman -Sy crda

# someeditor /etc/conf.d/wireless-regdom

You should see a good amount of countries listed by abbreviation. Uncomment the line with your country. Then, add the "wireless-regdom" daemon located in /etc/rc.d/ to your daemon list in rc.conf

Hope this helps!

Hi, thanks for the suggestion. I have already tried crda and wireless-regdom - since I live in Canada I've set the country to CA. I'll try US and see if that makes a difference.

EDIT: No difference, N is still terrible.

Last edited by got_milk? (2009-08-19 18:25:49)

francois_letendre

Member

Registered: 2009-09-14

Posts: 1

Re: Wireless woes

Hi,  I'm new into Archlinux.

I can confirm this problem using a DWA-552 (ath9k) adapter to connect to the DIR-655 router.

I tried both netcfg/netcfg2 and manual setup using wpa_supplicant.

Association with WPA2 goes fine up to dhcpcd failing to get an IP lease.  Dhclient doesn't work either.

This is only over a 802.11n.  As soon as I switch to 802.11g, everything is fine.

Edit:  I found this post doing a search.  For the record, in my case it's a desktop computer, not a laptop.

Last edited by francois_letendre (2009-09-14 02:50:33)