Arch Linux

drandre

Member

Registered: 2009-04-16

Posts: 35

Trouble (not failure) reconnecting to wireless ralink 2860

I notice recently that connecting to my wireless network (typically after resume from sleep) takes several attempts.  It never used to.  The network setup has not changed at all.  I'm connecting using wicd (running the client under the kdemod 4.3 beta DE in case that matters).

The daemons log shows:

2009-06-03 08:57:00    akoya    dhcpcd    dhcpcd not running
2009-06-03 08:57:00    akoya    dhcpcd    dhcpcd not running
2009-06-03 08:57:01    akoya    dhcpcd    ra0: carrier acquired
2009-06-03 08:57:01    akoya    dhcpcd    ra0: rebinding lease of 192.168.0.188
2009-06-03 08:57:01    akoya    dhcpcd    ra0: carrier lost
2009-06-03 08:57:09    akoya    dhcpcd    ra0: carrier acquired
2009-06-03 08:57:09    akoya    dhcpcd    ra0: rebinding lease of 192.168.0.188
2009-06-03 08:57:09    akoya    dhcpcd    ra0: acknowledged 192.168.0.188 from 192.168.0.1
2009-06-03 08:57:09    akoya    dhcpcd    ra0: checking for 192.168.0.188
2009-06-03 08:57:10    akoya    dhcpcd    dhcpcd already running on pid 3179 (/var/run/dhcpcd-ra0.pid)
2009-06-03 08:57:13    akoya    dhcpcd    ra0: carrier lost
2009-06-03 08:57:13    akoya    dhcpcd    dhcpcd not running
2009-06-03 08:57:13    akoya    dhcpcd    dhcpcd not running
2009-06-03 08:57:21    akoya    dhcpcd    ra0: carrier acquired
2009-06-03 08:57:21    akoya    dhcpcd    ra0: rebinding lease of 192.168.0.188
2009-06-03 08:57:21    akoya    dhcpcd    ra0: acknowledged 192.168.0.188 from 192.168.0.1
2009-06-03 08:57:21    akoya    dhcpcd    ra0: checking for 192.168.0.188
2009-06-03 08:57:22    akoya    dhcpcd    dhcpcd already running on pid 3179 (/var/run/dhcpcd-ra0.pid)
2009-06-03 08:57:25    akoya    dhcpcd    ra0: carrier lost
2009-06-03 08:57:25    akoya    dhcpcd    dhcpcd not running
2009-06-03 08:57:25    akoya    dhcpcd    dhcpcd not running
2009-06-03 08:57:26    akoya    dhcpcd    ra0: carrier acquired
2009-06-03 08:57:26    akoya    dhcpcd    ra0: rebinding lease of 192.168.0.188
2009-06-03 08:57:26    akoya    dhcpcd    ra0: carrier lost
2009-06-03 08:57:34    akoya    dhcpcd    ra0: carrier acquired
...
2009-06-03 08:57:49    akoya    dhcpcd    ra0: carrier acquired
2009-06-03 08:57:49    akoya    dhcpcd    ra0: rebinding lease of 192.168.0.188
2009-06-03 08:57:49    akoya    dhcpcd    ra0: acknowledged 192.168.0.188 from 192.168.0.1
2009-06-03 08:57:49    akoya    dhcpcd    ra0: checking for 192.168.0.188
2009-06-03 08:57:50    akoya    dhcpcd    dhcpcd already running on pid 3179 (/var/run/dhcpcd-ra0.pid)
2009-06-03 08:57:54    akoya    dhcpcd    ra0: leased 192.168.0.188 for 86400 seconds

So you see it has a number of unsuccessful attempts to configure, each time apparently "loosing the carrier" (to paraphrase) before finally getting a lease and subsequently working just fine.

This would not be so bad except that it often takes on the order of a minute of retries to connect which is a bit frustrating.  It takes that long to boot and login from cold.  Plus this is a recent thing.  Anyone else experience this regression?   Any hints on hunting it down?

Thanks.

bwh1969

Member

Registered: 2008-01-05

Posts: 151

Re: Trouble (not failure) reconnecting to wireless ralink 2860

I had this problem with the same card in my Asus EEE-box.  I got so annoyed, I blacklisted the ralink driver and went with ndiswrapper and the windows driver.  It works flawlessly.

It happens in Ubuntu also.  It would also take forever to connect and also, would become really slow or would drop the connection, but not.  It would show it was connected, but I could not get any traffic unless I reconnected.

In both cases I also tried to use the ralink driver compiled from the ralink site.  It was still quirky and unreliable.

Use ndisrappwer.  You'll have to blacklist the sta(some bunch of numbers I don't remember).  If you really need to know, post back and I will look it up on my desktop.

drandre

Member

Registered: 2009-04-16

Posts: 35

Re: Trouble (not failure) reconnecting to wireless ralink 2860

Interested in what versions you are talking about.  I have had no troubles with the ralink driver up until the last few weeks.  This includes ubuntu (8.10 with 2.6.28 backports and ralink firmware added) and arch now kernel 2.6.29.  For me this is a very recent thing

MoonSwan

Member

From: Great White North

Registered: 2008-01-23

Posts: 881

Re: Trouble (not failure) reconnecting to wireless ralink 2860

I had an issue where my ralink chip would disconnect randomly after a few minutes.  It did this starting a few weeks ago too, but the recent dhcpcd update fixed it.  I suggest trying dhclient if updating dhcpcd doesn't work for you.