Hi guys. I am experiencing a major slowdown in browsing on my network from my XP(sp2) box to my RH9 box.

Background: I am a tattoo artist with a linux box up front in the lobby for my customers to browse digitized tattoo flash. I figured that Linux was a viable and secure solution where I could secure it enough to avoid kiddies deleting the images. It's running a pci Cisco Aironet 4800 card shooting a wireless signal to my Linksys(Cisco)WCG200 WAP/Cable Gateway. My office machine is running XP and is connected to the WAP via USB. Since I have no problem with speed issues browsing the web but DO have problems browsing the SMB shares on my Linux machine from the XP box, my gut tells me the problem lies with the Linux machine somewhere. I have updated all my packages with apt-get and tweaked my hard disk using hdparm. After looking around for help online, I'm still befuddled. Ping test results from the linux machine to the cloud are very slow as well, usually averaging 700ms Unfortunately I don't have access to another pci card for the linux box. I am certain I'm either overlooking or ignorant to a simple solution. Do any of you have any insights/suggestions Forgive me if I've left out critical info.

TIA,

If the ping times are that slow, it's a base network problem, not a software promlem on the linux box.

What's the distance and physical barrier factor between the two like? I get ~350ms to yahoo.com on a decent DSL via wireless to my laptop and the AP is two solid walls and ~300ft of office (desks, phones, switching equipment and people) away.

There's only about 8" of drywall and about 20' of air between the linux machine and the AP. I have both set to channel 1. When you say base network problem, are you referring to a physical layer issue?

Correct, layer 1.

Do you have anything in there that could be creating a lot of RF noise? Maybe try a different channel?

As a test to see if it's something in the environment, you could move the machine (or the AP) to get them closer together and see if that improves things. Just pure 802.11b should run ping times down around 5ms (to hosts on the same segment).

It's possible that the card is going bad, or even one (or both) of the antennas. I'm not really sure how to tell you to test without the ability to change out some equipment though.

Well, setting it on chan2 and locking it to 802.11b trimmed quite a bit off the ping times and seemed to speed the network browsing up too. Thanks for everything

I hate to be a hit and run type of guy, and am always curious how things work to avoid making the same mistakes over and over. So, if you wouldn't mind, can you explain why in this case 802.11b was preferrable to "g" in this scenario? I think I had it set up to handle both originally (default setting).

Again I truly appreciate the help.