Connection drops out, must reboot?

tmpatrick · 11-09-2005, 01:07 PM

I've been having trouble with my wireless connection dropping out after a period of inactivity as little as five minutes from booting (depends). I checked iwconfig, and everything looks good:

Code:

lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

Warning: Driver for device wlan0 recommend version 18 of Wireless Extension,
but has been compiled with version 17, therefore some driver features
may not be available...

wlan0     IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:"back40"  
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.462 GHz  Access Point: 00:11:50:52:D1:4F   
          Bit Rate:48 Mb/s   Tx-Power:20 dBm   Sensitivity=-120 dBm  
          RTS thr:2347 B   Fragment thr:2346 B   
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:99/100  Signal level:-75 dBm  Noise level:-256 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:22477  Invalid misc:20510   Missed beacon:0

sit0      no wireless extensions.

...except the v18 warning, (which doesn't seem to be troubling anyone else online as far as I can tell from my searching), everything seems in order. I've got a 128-bit WEP key, and that works just fine. The problem seems to be it's not recovering from a dropped connection, which I understand just happens with wifi. Is there something I should include in my /etc/network/interfaces file so it knows to reconnect if the wifi drops signal? I've got it in the hotplug section as "map wlan0"

As it stands I have to keep an "active" connection, or reboot if I need remote access to it. I'm running Ubuntu 5.10.

Any ideas? Thanks very much.

fouldsy · 11-09-2005, 01:22 PM

Looks like you've used ndiswrapper (yes/no?), but what wireless care are you actually using and which drivers did you use?

tmpatrick · 11-09-2005, 01:49 PM

I did install a driver for ndiswrapper (rt2500 - Win2K version, not WinXP), and it comes up okay: "Installed ndis drivers: rt2500 - driver present, hardware present." I've got a Belkin 802.11g desktop card (F5D7000, v3001); mine uses the RaLink RT2560, contrary to what is listed on the ndiswrapper list (http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/m...index.php/List) - I've actually pried up the faceplate and checked the chipset.

Here's how dmesg reads:

Code:

[4294692.249000] ndiswrapper version 1.4 loaded (preempt=no,smp=no)
[4294692.330000] ndiswrapper: driver rt2500 (Ralink Technology, Inc.,06/10/2004, 2.02.06.0000) loaded
[4294692.330000] ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:01:06.0[A] -> Link [APC3] -> GSI 18 (level, high) -> IRQ 18
[4294692.332000] ndiswrapper: using irq 18
[4294693.381000] wlan0: vendor: 'IEEE 802.11g Wireless Card.'
[4294693.381000] wlan0: ndiswrapper ethernet device 00:11:50:15:74:fa using driver rt2500, 1814:0201.5.conf
[4294693.381000] wlan0: encryption modes supported: WEP; TKIP with WPA; AES/CCMP with WPA
...
[4294716.983000] wlan0: no IPv6 routers present

Any clues? Where else should I look? Does this have to do with my Linux rig falling asleep, and dropping the connection on its own volition?

Thanks.

fishywang · 11-21-2005, 05:46 AM

I have the same problem, that my wifi connection may drop (maybe because of ap reboot, or maybe because of idle), and can't reconnect except reboot.
I'm also using ndiswrapper on Kubuntu 5.1.0

fishywang · 11-29-2005, 03:29 AM

I've found the resolution of this problem!

use the following command to disable power management of wlan card:

Code:

iwconfig wlan0 power off

or add the following line into your wlan0 config file (/etc/network/interfaces on Debian):

Code:

wireless_power off

That's it!

otchie1 · 11-29-2005, 04:07 AM

The original poster has already done that as evidenced by his first code block.

I can't think why this is happening other than to suggest that maybe there is a problem with the firmware that you used with ndiswrapper? Perhaps a different version?

To reconnect without a reboot try

Code:

ifconfig wlan0 down
ifconfig wlan0 up
iwconfig wlan0 essid back40
dhcpcd wlan0

or is it dhclient rather than dhcpcd for Ubuntu - haven't needed to do that in a while on the laptop.

Added later.....just noticed that you're using Belkin kit. I've had nothing but trouble with Belkin wifi products with their constant desire to be rebooted/reset. If you can afford it junk them and replace with Linksys and/or USR stuff which for me have been troublefree.

Gotblade · 03-03-2011, 08:13 PM

I whent through the steps to get better screen resolution out of the new open source nouveau graphics driver & ended up with a new custom kernel compiled for that purpose. As a side bennefit my wireless connection is much more reliable than before. I believe I checked built in support (not modular) for wireless when configuring the kernel. That may be of some use to somebody. I hope so!