Wireless network connection instability
I recently started using a new DSL service (SBC Yahoo! DSL) and they provided me with a 2wire Wireless Router for my home. Because I just moved in here, and there isn't any Ethernet run through the house (urg) I decided to go the wireless route for my desktop as well as my laptops.
I picked up a Netgear MA311 Wireless network card (Prism 2.5 chipset) and tossed it in my Gentoo box. After about 30 minutes fooling around with the iwconfig tools and making sure I had the right modules in my 2.6 kernel I was up and running on the wireless network. iwconfig reported a 80/92 signal strength and 11 MBits speed on the network so I was pretty happy.
Then I ran into a problem. A friend of mine connected to my machine over ssh and started downloading a file (about 250MB) and all of a sudden my wireless signal strength went to 0 and I lost the connection. After fooling around with it for a while I realized that anytime I start sending large quantities of data my signal strength goes to nothing and the connection dies. This doesn't happen when I receive data. This also doesn't happen if I connect my machine to the router over Ethernet cable (which isn't a great solution cause my desktop isn't anywhere near a phone jack so I end up with wire all over the house).
I am stumped. Does anyone have any idea what could cause this to happen? As I said earlier, I am using a Harris Prism 2.5 chipset PCI wireless card (Netgear MA311). I am using the support for the card that is built into the 2.6.0 kernel and configuring the card using iwconfig. My OS is Gentoo 1.4 updated pretty much once a week and all the wireless tools, kernel, and such were downloaded and installed through the portage package system.
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.
John
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