Arch Linux

fflarex

Member

Registered: 2007-09-15

Posts: 466

[SOLVED] Wireless connection drops all the time...

I've been having a lot of trouble recently with my new Arch installations. On two separate laptops, my wireless connection will drop out right after the first download. So for example, if I boot up my machine and update with pacman, it will download the first package/db and then fail on all the rest. If instead of updating, I open a web browser, it will do fine on the home page and then fail on all subsequent pages. Every time I want to make another connection to the outside world I have to restart my connection. I'm using netcfg on all these machines, but I've also tried out networkmanager, wicd, and the regular cli tools with the same result.

This doesn't happen in Windows or Ubuntu on the same machines, nor on my much older desktop Arch installation, leading me to conclude it's probably not a hardware/driver or network issue. I've exhausted my limited knowledge of networking and I don't know what to do now. Can anyone give me a hand here?

Last edited by fflarex (2010-05-31 01:41:18)

hokasch

Member

Registered: 2007-09-23

Posts: 1,461

Re: [SOLVED] Wireless connection drops all the time...

What wireless chipset do you have? Can you see disconnect errors in dmesg?

fflarex

Member

Registered: 2007-09-15

Posts: 466

Re: [SOLVED] Wireless connection drops all the time...

On one machine I have an Intel 4965, which has worked perfectly in every recent distro release. I'm using a Realtek 8172 on the machine I'm currently trying to get working. It is admittedly a troublesome chipset, but I have the drivers from AUR and I think I have that part figured out. I just installed the rtl8192se package and loaded the r8192se_pci module.

If you can wait a few minutes I'll put my dmesg output on a pastebin somewhere and update this post. I don't know how to make sense of dmesg myself.

EDIT: http://pastebin.com/huLrKv4J

Last edited by fflarex (2010-05-29 21:59:54)

fflarex

Member

Registered: 2007-09-15

Posts: 466

Re: [SOLVED] Wireless connection drops all the time...

So I've been fiddling around more... It isn't the WPA encryption on my network, because I had the same issues when I turned the encryption off. Connecting to other networks is fine.

So it may have something to do with my home network after all, but it's still odd that I didn't have problems in Ubuntu.

EDIT: May have fixed it with a firmware update on the router. Still have no idea why Ubuntu could cope with whatever problem there was while Arch couldn't. I'll mark the topic solved after I've used my connection for a while and I'm positive there are no remaining issues.

Last edited by fflarex (2010-05-30 02:19:28)

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: [SOLVED] Wireless connection drops all the time...

All the Ubuntu patch diffs are available at http://packages.ubuntu.com/

Hint hint