[plug] Wireless dropouts

[William Kenworthy]

I have an ipw2100 in a sony vaio - excellent wireless using gentoo.  

I am using a recent kernel and firmware - some of the older (early 2.6)
kernels were not good and you had to load the project drivers and avoid
the in-kernel ones but worked very well once you did this.  I dislike
network manager and similar - too opaque and hard to faultfind when
things go wrong - which they do all too often when using it :(  Try
wireless tools such as iwconfig to manually setup the card after killing
networkmanager etc and see if the problem remains.  Ive tried network
manager under fedora and gentoo - shoot it!

The RT series chipsets in general seem to have a very poor reputation,
and few seem to like usb wireless under linux.

BillK

On Wed, 2008-12-31 at 19:15 +0900, Blake Munro wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> PLUG discussion list: plug at plug.org.au
> http://www.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/plug
> Committee e-mail: committee at plug.linux.org.au
-- 
William Kenworthy <billk at iinet.net.au>
Home in Perth!