Arch Linux

beretta

Member

Registered: 2008-04-21

Posts: 133

Verizon DNS issue?

I've just moved into a new apartment that is connected to the internet through a Verizon cable.  In trying to get my computers connected to the internet, I've run into a few strange issues I don't understand:

The symptoms:

If I use the commands

$ iwconfig wlan0 essid "essid-name" key "wep key"
$ ifconfig wlan0 up
$ dhcpcd wlan0

I'm able to get the router to hand me an IP  (I know wep isn't great-- not my router.  I'll deal with that later.)
However, if I configure a network config file for netcfg, it times out regardless of what I put in TIMEOUT=:::

When I connect with the manual commands, the network works for a while, but then cuts out on me completely.  It takes a few tries before I can get an IP reissued, even with the manual commands.

One of my roommates has also been having trouble with it (on a windows machine) and can only get connected directly with an ethernet cable.  So I tried that this morning, and found that I do get connected (sometimes netcfg will even work), and the connection seems to stay up (eg. through a bittorrent connection or ssh) but it stops resolving names shortly after connection.  (It worked for a while, now I can't browse the web, even though other network activity seems to behave normally)

I have a mac laptop from work that seems to connect, though it doesn't like being too far away from the router and sometimes it drops/reconnects repeatedly for a bit.

My thoughts:

As far as the name resolving issue, I'm wondering if there's something misconfigured for the DNS, but I'll need to get my roommate to let me into the router configuration to check that.

I have no clue why the wireless cuts out or why netcfg won't work for the wireless.

Has anyone ever seen this kind of behavior before?