[plug] Wireless dropouts

[Blake Munro]

Hi pluggers,

Our house is primarily *nix based. We have one PC (a netbook!) which has
Windows XP installed, 1 Ubuntu PC, 1 CentOS PC and a Macbook.

Both the Ubuntu & CentOS PC's have constant dropouts with wireless. The Mac
and Windows box are perfectly fine.
Ubuntu PC has an rt73usb (Linksys 54G USB adapter) and the CentOS machine is
an IBM T40 laptop with built in ipw2100 (Intel wireless).

It only seems to happen when you are just that 'little bit' further away
from the router. The Ubuntu PC is in the room next door to the router, yet
the laptop is normally used up the other end of the house.

The Ubuntu PC is somewhat more reliable than the laptop, however it still
requires a reboot about once a day. Once the connection drops out, it just
refuses to re-establish it without a reboot. Restarting NetworkManager or
any other networking services has no effect.

The laptop on the other hand will work perfect if I am sitting right next to
the router, yet as soon as I move into a different room it is as flaky as
all hell.

The netbook (Acer Aspire One) with WinXP and the Macbook work out on the
street verge, so it can hardly be directly blamed on a poor signal from the
router. Even my smartphone can get 2 out of 5 bars from the Wi-fi standing
outside, and it can hold the connection stable for ages.

It just seems to me that Linux is being extremely fussy in one way or
another and is really poor when it comes to holding up the signal.

I tried my mate's D-Link 604GT (I think that is what it was) and the
wireless signal was quite poor on that, even with the Windows PC, but it did
not seem to drop out as much on the linux machines.

Is my only option to give up and go out and purchase a new router? I've had
a good innings with this Billion 7402VGO, I purchased it as soon as they
came out, which I think was about 2004 or 2005 and it's always just
'worked'.
I have tried using WEP, WPA, No security etc. It seems to make no
difference. I currently have WPA/TKIP set up.

This is something that has been annoying the heck out of me for ages and I
would love to be able to get to the bottom of it!

Any input would be greatly appreciated. Cheers :)
Blake
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