2009-08-04

unexplainable WiFi connection drops on Dell D430

Dear Lazyweb,

Since a few days, my Dell D430 running Ubuntu Jaunty has started to experience random WiFi connection drops. After a few hours of normal operation, even though the Network Manager applet indicates that the connection is still with me and with a strong signal, doing a ping to my WRT54GL running OpenWRT 0.9 (White Russian) replies with "Destination Unreachable".

My D430 comes with the following WiFi adapter:

0c:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN [Kedron] Network Connection (rev 61)

Does this situation sound familiar to anyone? If yes, how did you resolve it?

6 comments:

Jason said...

Intel 4965 is hardware restricted to <= channel 11. Perhaps your router is going > 11?

Martin-Éric said...

No setting was ever changed on this 4965 or the router so, whatever channel it offered so far have always worked.

Martin-Éric said...

Also, now that I checked, it seems that the WRT54GL cannot go to any channel higher than 11 either.

toots said...

Network-manager sucks. I was experiencing the same issues, and everything went back to normal once I switched to cwid.

Martin-Éric said...

Network-Manager itself is fine. It has worked for me rock-solid ever since it's been installed on this laptop. The only exception has been over the past few days.

Unknown said...

Actually, I have to echo the "NM sucks" comment. I have had issues with certain routers (either 2wire routers that AT&T DSL sends out in Northern California or Trendnet routers) using Network Manager with frequent disconnections and such.

When I switched over to using wpa_supplicant and dhclient directly, it worked much better.

I would suggest that you try connecting to the router via the most basic tools available (either bare iwconfig for WEP or wpa_supplicant for WPA) just to rule out userland problems.