Windows 7 client stops to see Debian server
 

Hi all,

this is my first post in this forum.

Tried to search the issue but failed and I'm kinda stuck in confusion. I got a Debian Squeeze home server that shares multimedia. It has a samba share and a mediatomb instance running. It's connected via a wifi connection to a router. I use not networkmanager for that but the old /etc/network/interfaces method.

The client is a Windows 7 machine connected via an Ethernet cable to the router. Everything works fine for some random period of time until windows completely stops to see the Debian machine. A can no longer get access to the samba share. Neither I can even ping the debian machine. Still I can ping the Windows machine from Debian and both machines have no problems pinging google or loading a random web site.

Disabling and re-enabling the interface on Windows doesn't help but once I do /etc/init.d/networking restart the problem is gone. The MTU for both OSes is set to 1500.

So I don't even have a clue what machine is to blame for that. Thought that that's because of Debian cause restarting the network on Debian helps, but on the other hand Debian seems to work fine, it's the Windows that cause the problem. Hope anyone can help with that issue.

For testing purposes, can you connect the Debian box up with an ethernet cable?

Alternatively, try rebooting the router the next time this happens without doing /etc/init.d/networking restart and seeing what happens.

It's a shot in the dark, but maybe the wireless is going to sleep (I mean that colloquially, not as a technical computer term). I haven't seen that happen on Linux, but I have seen that happen on Windows boxes after a period of inactivity, and my Debian isn't wireless.

Thanks for the reply Frankbell,

I'm not pretty sure I've gotten the grip on what you mean. If you're talking about the powersaving mode for network cards on Windows it hardly can cause the issue I guess cause I forgot to mention that the problem is pretty rare. It happens once a week or so. It's not the period of time one would expect from a card to wait for before going to the powersaving mode.

Concerning the router restart it's a good idea, will do it next time I face the issue and see what happens. I'm also gonna try to ping the Debian from other devices and the router itself before that. Don't know why it didn't came to me before =)

As I said, shot in the dark (grin).

Glad you're working.

So I've been testing the issue for a while now. Since then I had several disconnections with the server, but those times the Debian machine completely lost the connection, couldn't ping or load anything, neither it was pingable from any home network device. Then I switched the Debian machine to Ethernet and the issue seems to be gone. My guess the quality of linux wlan drivers are to blame for that.