802.11b WLAN, WEP and amd64 stalls under high traffic

furanku

Hi!

I recently changed my machine to a AMD64 x2 4200+ from an Athlon 1700+, moving also my Netgear MA 311 WLAN Card to the new machine. Except for recompiling the necessary driver and tools for the new CPU (amd64 System) I reused the configuration files from the old machine. If I now generate high network traffic, e.g. by downloading a huge source tar ball during an emerge, the network stalls after a few seconds. In most of the cases it comes up again after some 10 seconds in some cases I had to interrupt the transfer and restart the download. In the logfiles I find entries like "AP out range" and "AP in range", but the signal strength should be good enough and was it during the last two years with the old machine.

My guess is that this has something to do with the WEP encryption I use (I know it's not secure anymore, but as long as the card and the router doesn't provide anything better it's better then nothing). It's just a guess: I don't remember where and can't find it anymore but I heard of such problems in other forums. The card worked perfectly on the old 32 bit machine.

Has anyone experienced the same problems or has a solution?

UberLord · Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2006 4:31 pm Post subject:

If that's using the madwifi driver then you're experiencing the same thing I am. I actually blamed it on my Draytek AP which is notoriously bad for this, but now you mention it, it maybe the madwifi driver.

But anyway, I'm so ticked off with it I wanged a rt2500pci card in my server (got one already in my amd64) and now run an ad-hoc + wep connection that's slower (ad-hoc == 11mbs) and more insecure (no wep), but it's 100% reliable. The unexpected bonus is that running a seperate subnet for my wireless through my server means I can shape traffic on the router ethernet for better latency on the internet

_________________
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furanku · Posted: Wed Feb 15, 2006 9:05 am Post subject:

I'm using a Netgear MA 311 (Prism 2.5 based Card) with the orinoco driver from the 2.6.15-gentoo-r4 sources. In the meantime I'm so annoyed of it (I'm also using a wireless UPnP media renderer, which crashes if it loses contact to the server

) that I'll upgrade to some 802.11g card.

Ahhh... wonderfull times are coming again

going through all the mailing lists and driver sites to find a working combination of router, pci, pcmcia card, arguing with shop assistents to open the box so I can see the revision of the card, compiling kernel after kernel, being a steady guest on support mailing lists ... I'm really a linux lover but these are the moments when I envy Windows users.

Frank, ready to go into the wilderness.

furanku · Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2006 8:28 am Post subject:

UberLord · Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2006 10:44 am Post subject:

furanku · Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2006 11:13 am Post subject:

Thank you so much!

That saved me a lot of time and annoyance. Seems like noone's building stable WLAN stuff anymore these days ... I nearly bought a Netgear router because of good expeirence with my old one, just to find out on the internet that Netgear never got the firmware of the new one even semi stable.

UberLord · Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2006 12:22 pm Post subject:

madwifi should work as will prism54
_________________
Use dhcpcd for all your automated network configuration needs
Use dhcpcd-ui (GTK+/Qt) as your System Tray Network tool