Occasional wifi connection drop in one specific part of the house

ngoonee · 2021-06-16 01:10:15

I've got a Mesh network (Deco M9 plus, two units).

The master unit is downstairs in my living room, and that's where I normally use my Arch laptop. No issues here, no dropping of connection, regularly do multi-hour Teams/Zoom/Meets and the like for work.

The secondary unit upstairs is connected to the master unit using the dedicated 5GHz backhaul. A raspberry pi is connected to it by LAN.

In my upstairs bedroom, my Arch laptop occasionally experiences connection drops (wifi shows as connected but without any actual working network). Teams/Zoom/Meets will lag and then stop when this happens, websites won't load, etc.

My other devices (smartphones, an older windows laptop my wife uses) does not exhibit these issues. Even my Arch laptop didn't use to exhibit these issues a few months back.

To hopefully rule out the secondary mesh unit as an issue, the raspberry pi connected to it by LAN doesn't seem to disconnect at these times (still have to further test this).

Could there have been any updates/changes in the network stack over the past 2 or 3 months which would be related?

I'm using Intel Corporation Dual Band Wireless-AC 7265 (iwlwifi), fully updated (on [testing]). Am not ruling out a possible creeping hardware issue on the laptop itself, but the fact it works consistently under other conditions is odd.

EDIT: Oops forgot to mention, I'm using network-manager.

Last edited by ngoonee (2021-06-16 01:10:50)

jasonwryan · 2021-06-16 01:23:35

Anything interesting in the journal when the connection drops? Is the Pi running any network-intensive tasks that might be soaking up the constrained bandwidth?

My first step would be to swap the two mesh units, to determine if one is not propagating a decent signal.

ngoonee · 2021-06-16 01:37:10

jasonwryan wrote:

Anything interesting in the journal when the connection drops? Is the Pi running any network-intensive tasks that might be soaking up the constrained bandwidth?
My first step would be to swap the two mesh units, to determine if one is not propagating a decent signal.

Nope, journal doesn't show anything. The Pi is running some discord bots, and the backup tasks which would use significant bandwidth are scheduled for times when I'm not using anything (2-3am) so should not be an issue. The clock on the pi is properly NTPDed so unlikely to be that. I will check though, thanks. The fact that other devices in the same area (especially my phone) don't experience this disconnecting seems to suggest to me the issue may be on my laptop specifically (that being said I'm sure my phone has a much better network chip for starters).

I will try swapping the mesh units, that's easy enough to do.

jasonwryan · 2021-06-16 03:28:47

ngoonee wrote:

Even my Arch laptop didn't use to exhibit these issues a few months back.

One thing that did occur to me in that timeframe: I was using connman on my laptop (iwlwifi) but around the same time reconnecting after sleep got really, really slow. There may have also been some other performance issues, but I don't recall. Anyway, I switched to systemd-networkd and have had no issues since.

Arch Linux

#1 2021-06-16 01:10:15

Occasional wifi connection drop in one specific part of the house

#2 2021-06-16 01:23:35

Re: Occasional wifi connection drop in one specific part of the house

#3 2021-06-16 01:37:10

Re: Occasional wifi connection drop in one specific part of the house

#4 2021-06-16 03:28:47

Re: Occasional wifi connection drop in one specific part of the house

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