Fedora 11, ThinkPad T400, Intel 5300 seems to drop connection a lot?
Hi,
I just got a ThinkPad T400 laptop and have been having some issues with my wireless card. It is an Intel 5300 card. It seems like on average every few minutes the connection just seems to drop randomly. The network manager still seems to think everything is fine since it never pops-up anything saying the connection has been dropped. Yet, when I'm trying to get on a website, it either takes forever and when it finally does load, it doesn't load right and I end up having to refresh it, or it immediately goes to the Offline page. The logs don't seem to indicate anything obvious going on. Of course, all I did was have some windows up with tail -f /var/log/messages or dmesg running to see if anything unusual is going on. Nothing is reported when these drops happened. I know it can't be my router, because any other device can connect to it just fine. This laptop never has trouble connecting to it and getting a DHCP address. That part always succeeds. It's just that while I'm browsing it just randomly drops the connection and it's frustrating. I'm starting to believe it's something to do with the driver of this wifi card or maybe even the wifi card itself. I've been googling various posts about people having similar issues with these cards but haven't found a solution yet. I have two hard drives for this laptop that I swap out. One has Windows Vista (the OEM-provided drive) and another drive with Fedora 11 loaded on it. What's interesting is that it doesn't work on Windows very well either. So I tried upgrading the driver and things got even worse. When I upgraded the driver, it then couldn't even find a DHCP address anymore and thus I couldn't go anywhere with that. I decided to give up on that and figured I really only cared about getting the wifi to work better on Linux for now. I have a wired connection on my desktop nearby that connects to the same router. It seems for the most part to work fine. Every once in a while I might get a dropped connection but it's much less frequent than my laptop. I guess I should try to post some details about what I have... Code:
[xxx@localhost ~]$ lspci Code:
iwlcore 114756 1 iwlagn Code:
[xxx@localhost ~]$ dmesg | grep iwlagn |
iwlwifi does randomly crash, and often doesn't notify NetworkManager of it. i've not seen it do it that frequently though - it might be to do with the fact that you've got a newer laptop; didja file a bug at the iwlwifi project?
L |
Do you have a decent signal strength all the way through this process? Do you have neighbours using the same channels (or any other cause of interference 2.4G is quite busy)? Either of those could be bad and need checking out before anything else.
You should be on solid ground with intel wireless chipsets as they seem to be well supported and standardised, in comparison to some of the others. Could you try opening a console (konsole or whatever terminal app you have with your choice of gui) and run a ping task in the background, something like Quote:
This will show up whether you are getting intermittant response times. Sometimes I've seen the very task of trying to run a ping like that act as a 'work-around' for network connections that, if left to their own devices, would time out. I'm not sure exactly what happens, but wifi hotspots sometimes do this (probably either a time-out in the user logging process, or a time-out in an over-agressive firewall causing it to get out of sync with your packets). Also network manager has been a bit buggy (at the very least in a cosmetic sense) latest versions seem much better; can you ensure that you have the latest for your distro? |
Have you tried another wireless network just to isolate the issue to your machine?
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It could be hardware.
I have a used IBM X31 that keeps dropping the wired LAN connection. I put a pc card lan in it and the connection is solid. In my case it could be an intermittent connection of the RJ-45 receptacle to the motherboard. If you can borrow a pc card wireless lan, it would help in isolating the source of the problem. |
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