I wonder if anyone has any ideas about what is going on here...

I have a Compaq Presario v5000 series laptop and it runs both Puppy Linux (latest Lucid) and Ubuntu.

I've been having a strange problem with our router at home, but now I'm at my dad's and his routers just doing the same thing and it's only doing it when my laptop is connected so I'm guessing it's something to do with either Linux or the laptop.

It happens in both Puppy Linux and Ubuntu.

What happens is I'll be using the internet and suddenly the entire internet will disappear. All web pages like Google, etc will all come up with the usual connection error message.

When I look at the routers screen it says it's still got a valid IP address and is still connected fine to the ADSL. But every other computer on the network also get's disconnected as well. At home we have about 4 computers connected to the net, at my dad's he has 1.

At home we're on a Linksys router and the only way to fix this there is to turn the router off and back on again and it re-connects.

At my dad's he is on a Netgear router and we've found that you can just click Disconnect and then Connect in the router settings page instead to re-establish a connection.

I'm quite sure it's something that this computer is doing as it only happens when this laptop is connected to the network, all other computers connected the internet connection can last connected for ages with no problems.

Also one other thing I have noticed about this laptop is something strange is happening to the hard drive. Originally this laptop was running Windows XP and it started running really slow and the hard drive was grinding constantly, so I first used Puppy from a CD and that worked fine, then I tried installing Slackware to the hard drive, at first it was fine but after about a week the hard drive was grinding like mad, so I formatted the drive and installed Ubuntu on it, and again the hard drive was grinding like mad, now I mainly use Puppy Linux as it runs of CD there is no hard drive grinding issue. I assume that is just 'cos of the age the hard drive is possibly on the way out - even though the drive has got SMART on it and error testing shows no problems with the hard drive.

I was wondering whether a virus might have got onto the system, but if that is the case that wouldn't make any sense as the original problems started in Windows, and then I used Puppy Linux which is all CD based so the virus shouldn't be able to transfer from one OS to another, or onto a CD installation, and then I even re-formatted the HDD 3 times fully including the boot block so surely if it is a virus it can't be in there after all that. Also the main grinding noise problem I have seems to happen really bad when I try and load any web page up that has Flash based content at other times the drive runs fine, but again Flash has been re-installed numerous times on the various OS's with different plugins each time.

If anyone has any ideas it would be great to know. I can only presume the grinding issue is totally separate issue to the wi-fi disconnection problems.

"Puppy Linux and Ubuntu" This makes me think it has to do with some of your settings.

I'd recheck this with only one computer running a live cd/dvd/usb in linux or even a UBCD4Win/Barts cd. Will it work correctly?


In many homes today, a router or modem/router is the point of connection. If we knew the isp and device and how you set it up we might make a better guess. In the case where your point of connection is the router and any and all clients "just connect" then I'd think either the ISP or router is funky.

A very slim chance it could be some lan or wan computer doing this. It could be that you have enabled dhcp on the live cd and when lease time comes up it fails.

I'd diag this with other tools. Dig, tracert. Log on the router and look for issues or logs.

Thanks for the answer Jefro.

Yes I did consider that as it disconnects all computers then it should be the router that is wrong and not the Linux distro, but I just find it really strange that my dad's can last for ages without cutting out until I go there and connect my linux laptop and then suddenly it starts disconnecting about every 10 minutes.

At home the disconnection is about every 24 hours normally at about 8am so it is a bit more consistent, and does seem to go in time with when the IP address expires with the ISP so I suppose there it could be something to do with the router not renewing the IP address properly, but it only ever happens when this laptop is actually connected. I've been away for a few days at my dads and my sisters said that the internet has been fine, I reconnected this laptop to the internet at 8:30 this morning so it's after the new IP lease at my dad's though it was very random.

For the ISP's I have Plus.net here, we're only on a very basic ADSL1 line (2mbps max) as we're in the middle of the country here (Shropshire) and about 3 miles from the exchange, at my dad's though he is on TalkTalk in Lymm with the exchange round the corner from his house, it's a fibre exchange but he's still on an ADSL2 connection and gets about 15-20mbps from it.

So we're on totally different ISP's, we've got two totally different routers one Netgear and one Linksys - neither of them are the ISP's routers.

There is one thing that I did notice stopped the disconnecting at my dad's was when I closed Transmission down (Bittorrent P2P). I have Transmission running sharing things like Linux ISO's, OpenOffice, etc. All GPL stuff but I'm just wondering whether the ISPs are just seeing it that it's BitTorrent and not bothering to check whether the stuff being shared is GPL or not, if that's the case then it's a bit of a pain in the backside.

I guess you could run wireshark on it to see if any suspicious activity.

Did you try a boot to a new clean live cd?