Arch Linux

iliveinapark

Member

Registered: 2013-03-18

Posts: 33

Wireless connection drops out after a short period.

Hi all,

I recently did a fresh install on a new laptop (Dell XPS 13), and this is the first time I've used netctl instead of netcfg, so it may be that I've done something wrong there, though I have followed all the info on the wiki and the man pages.

I have been connecting to networks using

sudo wifi-menu

which has been working fine until today. I haven't tried using the netctl-auto service at all. My connection started dropping out this morning; restarting through wifi-menu fixed it the first time or two, but since then, it seems to connect for some time (from a couple seconds, to a few minutes), then disappear again. If I run

ping www.google.com

it will run, then hang, giving me dropped packets when I kill it with ctrl-c.

--- www.google.com ping statistics ---
86 packets transmitted, 63 received, 26% packet loss, time 85100ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 2.628/39.999/120.879/29.917 ms

Some tries (reconnecting with wifi-menu), I get no response at all, despite seemingly authenticating fine. On a related note, some of the time, the network scan using wifi-menu doesn't find all of the available networks.

Noone else seems to be having any trouble with the wireless (I work in a coworking space), and when the connection has failed the router is ureachable:

...
64 bytes from syd01s04-in-f16.1e100.net (74.125.237.16): icmp_seq=313 ttl=56 time=9.43 ms
From blah (192.168.254.179) icmp_seq=353 Destination Host Unreachable
...

...
64 bytes from 192.168.254.1: icmp_seq=338 ttl=64 time=2.76 ms
From 192.168.254.179 icmp_seq=378 Destination Host Unreachable
...

which suggests that the network is fine and the problem is local. Curiously, I seem to have no such issue when connected to the wireless hotspot on my phone.

Any ideas on what I can do to chase down the problem would be appreciated. So far, everything I've tried points to the connection being active, except for actually using it.

Other details (will fill out with more details, if you all can provide me with commands to use):

# lspci
...
01:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Centrino Advanced-N 6235 (rev 24)

# uname -a
Linux blah 3.9.6-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Jun 14 08:12:55 CEST 2013 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Thanks in advance.

iliveinapark

Member

Registered: 2013-03-18

Posts: 33

Re: Wireless connection drops out after a short period.

This thread actually got accidentally deleted, so there's a couple replies missing. I can't remember the other member's name, but (s)he suggested that I try loading the iwlwifi module without 5GHz enabled. I didn't manage to do it with modprobe, but added this:

cat /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf
options iwlwifi 5ghz_disable=1

and rebooted, but it didn't seem to make a difference.

In other news, I have had the pings above described above running on my home network for more than 5 min, and it hasn't stopped working yet. Not sure if that means anything. Again, any suggestions about what to check out will be appreciated.

Strike0

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2011-09-05

Posts: 1,489

Re: Wireless connection drops out after a short period.

That was me above, thanks. Too bad it did not help as a workaround.
Dropped pings are just result of the problem, to find the reason you should dig your logfiles, e.g.

dmesg |grep wlan0:

The symptons you describe sound a lot like a jammed router or weak signal. Signal strength you can check with "iw" (preferred) or also "iwconfig".
Maybe just move closer to it and see if that makes a change. Also you should check the profile generated by wifi-menu. Nice specs that machine btw.

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: Wireless connection drops out after a short period.

If we are going to be trying module loading options, I have heard from several people that using software crypto instead can sometimes help.  (swcrypto=1)

Hector

Member

Registered: 2012-09-18

Posts: 16

Re: Wireless connection drops out after a short period.

Download package crda and wireless-regdb next edit /etc/conf.d/wireless-regdom and uncomment redom for your country.After this reboot.