DNS/Connection problems

Leye · 2009-12-24 08:48:07

Hello,

I've been using Arch for a long time now and everything has worked fine until now. Recently, I'm having lots of connection problems with Arch. This began some months ago, the reason I post this problem not until now is that I was using Jolicloud (= Ubuntu) on my Netbook most of the time, but now I return to my main machine (also a notebook, with Arch).

Here's the problem: The internet connection is very, very slow or even breaks at all. With Epiphany, loading web pages takes a long time or even breaks so I get an error message saying the page cannot be loaded. Sometimes I get an error message about not being able to resolve the host. In the terminal, ping responds usually take >30000ms or I get no response at all. If I wait some time, I'll get a response after a while, and everything is fluent for some time (ping ~100ms), until the connection is so slow again.

Overall, the connection is very "spontaneous". It works for a while, and then the connection drops and it will get very slow. I'm always still connected to my WLAN though, it's just that the connection is so slow ...

This seems to be an Arch-specifig problem, since I don't have this with Ubuntu. I'm using Wifi with an Atheros card, lspci says AR5001 (though I can remember that it was AR5007EG some time ago ...).

Since I often get the message that the cannot be resolved, I thought of DNS problems. I've already configured my router to use an external DNS server (OpenDNS, so I can exclude provider-sided problems), but it didn't help (the netbook works fine though). In Arch, I added Google's DNS servers in /etc/resolv.conf like it is explained in the Wiki/OpenDNS, but this didn't help either.

By the way, I'm serious about the fact that the wireless card once was "AR5007EG". Even when Ubuntu was installed on this notebook some time ago, it said so. Now the new Archlinux says AR5001, and the new Linux Mint that I tried also says AR5001. Is this a driver-problem or was the card changed without me noticing? However, the name identity didn't affect Linux Mint. With Linux Mint, the connection went smoothly. It's just in Arch that I have this problems.

Any ideas what the reasons could be? It doesn't look like configuring DNS helped, and I'm clueless what I can do now.

Last edited by Leye (2009-12-24 08:49:44)

Leye · 2009-12-24 13:00:09

I'm really puzzled. I tried again to solve this problem by configuring netcfg and using this instead of the network daemon. Additionally, I added "nohook resolv.conf" to /etc/dhcpcd.conf so that there are only nameservers I've added in /etc/resolv.conf. And I disabled the IPv6 module.

Perhaps it got a little better ... instead of having a ping of 30000ms, now they range from 200ms-10000ms. Sometimes it seems like the more I ping, the longer it takes: First, the response times is about ~150ms, then it will get longer and longer up to 10000ms. If this doesn't happen, then instead the response time will jump around, first 150ms, then 7500ms, then 250ms, and so on ... and again something strange: ping'ing Google doesn't get any response, but a package download is progressing via pacman in the meantime.

Now however, sometimes even the package download fails, saying it takes to long time. Then it works again ...

Oh and I've also noticed that when ping is currently occupied waiting for responses (10000ms ...), then even Ctrl+C doesn't kill the process. Everything seems to lag. And sometimes I get no response for a while, and then a dozen in an instant (though their timeprint still says something around 10000ms). That is, I ping Google or Yahoo, get no response for a minute (it feels like a minute), then suddenly lots of responses show up in about 1 second, but their timeprints say it would have taken about 10000ms

If I ping Yahoo or Google on my netbook (with Jolicloud), the ping'ing takes about 50ms constantly, there are no changes. This is even smaller than the smallest response time with Arch. I wonder if there's a router-Arch difficulty in my network, but I checked the router and everything seems fine ...

EDIT
Oh and I'm sorry that I'm so bold and ask this question on Christmas ... I surely don't expect any response for the next couple of days, it's just because I'm currently alone at home, and I have nothing else to do (it's about afternoon in Germany, and we'll begin celebrating in the evening). Never mind, I hope all of you enjoy your holidays, I wish you a Merry Christmas!

Last edited by Leye (2009-12-24 13:02:39)

skottish · 2009-12-24 19:13:18

I don't know if you saw this thread or not, but a lot of people have been having problems with Atheros chipsets for a while. I don't know if there are any solutions to the problem though.

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=81930

Leye · 2009-12-24 20:47:43

I'm sorry I didn't know if this topic because I didn't browse the kernel problems, my bad ... From what I've read so far, this really seems to be a heavy issue. I tried the "solution" to upgrade to Testing's kernel-2.6.32, and I first had the impression that it got a little bit better ... I had a normal ping nearly as fast as my Jolicloud machine. However, in the middle of testing the network, the ping command replied "ping: sendmsg: Network is unreachable", and I got disassociated from my network. I guess now I belong to those ones having difficulties with associating to their access point.

Using netcfg again to set up the network connected me again, though this of course doesn't really help with this issue.

What I've also noticed however: I'm not sure, but I think I was using ath9k when I was using Arch some months ago, and also when I tried Linux Mint. Now I can only use ath5k because when using ath9k no wireless interface shows up.

For now, thanks for showing me the topic, I will follow the discussion, and hopefully, there will be a fix quite soon!

Arch Linux

#1 2009-12-24 08:48:07

DNS/Connection problems

#2 2009-12-24 13:00:09

Re: DNS/Connection problems

#3 2009-12-24 19:13:18

Re: DNS/Connection problems

#4 2009-12-24 20:47:43

Re: DNS/Connection problems

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