[ltp] strange behaviour of wireless

[Richard Neill]

On 08/08/11 08:07, Arno Trautmann wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm having some trouble with my wireless connection that I don't
> understand at all; I hope, you can help me even if I cannot offer clean
> technical details. The machine is X61s with a recent Arch Linux.
> Description of the symptoms:
> • Connecting at home to a WEP-encrypted network works, but /only/ at the
> second attempt. The first attempt to use dhcpcd times out every time,
> while the second one always works fine and immediately.

One thought: do you have NetworkManager (the system service) running? It 
does things in the background that can sometimes be strange...if you are 
manually configuring with iwconfig/dhclient, you may want to check it is 
off.

> • Having connected at home once, I am not able to connect to any other
> network, it just times out everytime. Only rebooting works. This is
> /only/ after connecting at home; using two other networks is no problem,
> and from another network to home works, too (again, only the second
> attempt)
> • Trying to reboot in such a situation (connecting to another network,
> timed out) mostly just halts with a message about IRQ #17. However,
> after the last update, I get a lot more messages. If they are important,
> I can try to write them down.


You might try one other distro (eg Ubuntu's) live CD (or live USB stick) 
- simply as a way to eliminate whether this is more likely a software or 
a hardware issue.


> • Ok, so far I'd just say “stupid Linux, doesn't work” (or rather
> “stupid user, doesn't configure correctly”). But now comes the part that
> doesn't make any sense to me: Whenever I connect to my home network, my
> rommates cannot. In fact, their machines don't even see the radiation
> any more. As soon as I disconnect, they have excellent signal strengths
> and connect immediately. When I reconnect, they're out, again.
>

Wireless g/b issue? Is it possible that you or they are on 802.11b and 
that this is making the access point switch modes. (Or, for that matter 
g vs a)?


HTH,

Richard


P.S. Can you post the relevant bit of lspci? Are you using a native 
Linux driver, or one of the binary linux blobs, or ndiswrapper?