Re: Frequent Disconnects

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Sun, 2007-07-22 at 16:35 -0700, Bill Moseley wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 22, 2007 at 06:02:21PM -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
> > On Sun, 2007-07-22 at 13:39 -0400, Patrick Hi wrote:
> > > So do you guys think it's just the weak signal strength and
> > > interference that is causing the disconnections? If so, what should I
> > > do about it. Would a different router help (mine's a westell
> > > versalink). I have the same problem only on all three computers
> > > running linux and connecting to my wireless network. The iMac has no
> > > problems, and when booted into windows the computers have no problem
> > > keeping connected. I just want to find some answers. 
> > 
> > Weak signal strength could cause them if you're at the margins of the
> > network, and the driver looses sync with the AP.  But if you still get
> > disconnections (ie, iwevent shows SIOCSIWAP events of 00:00:00:00:00:00)
> > when you're right next to the AP then we really need debug logs from the
> > driver to figure out why it thinks it's being kicked.
> 
> Mine is not weak signal.  I'm just a few feet from a Netgear WG302 and
> nm-applet shows all bars solid and something like 80%. 
> 
> My other linux laptop running Sarge and an Apple iBook don't have this
> problem.  The linux laptop is not using wpa_supplicant, either.
> 
> Can you explain how to generate useful debug logs?  I have an Atheros
> a/b/g/n card on a Thinkpad T60p using WPA-PSK.

I actually don't know, you'd have to check with the madwifi driver
developers.  Usually it's module config option or echoing something
to /proc or /sys for the driver.

> Also, would it be helpful to disable NetworkManager to manually
> config the card?  I'm not clear how to do this (I was using a
> prism-based card before without WPA).  Plus, I'm not clear how to
> monitor the card to see if there are any drop-outs.  The nm-applet
> makes it easy to see when the connection is lost, of course.

It might; but you may not be able to duplicate the config that NM will
send to NetworkManager, plus NM scans periodically.  So it's better to
get a driver debug log and figure out exactly why the driver thinks it's
lost the connection.

Dan