General wireless question

pinr · Posted: Fri Nov 18, 2005 6:17 pm Post subject: General wireless question

Hi This isn't really a Gentoo specific question, but I'm asking it here as I know you lot are pretty clever. I have a Toshiba Tecra 8200, which has been running Gentoo since I bought it second hand about 2 years ago. More info here:
http://solocopier.com/Gentoo_Toshiba/
I've also had a Tecnew Wireless router for the last 2 years and I've been using these two together without problems (apart from slow transfer rates) for the last 18 months. About two weeks ago I turned on the laptop and it refused to connect to the network. I checked my net config which seemed ok I tried various things all to no avail. Thinking it was something wrong with Gentoo I got hold of a copy of Knoppix and tried that. Still no connection my router seemed to be working ok as did the laptop, but no connection. In complete and utter desperation I soiled my Gentoo laptop by installing a copy of windows on a spare partion. The windows drivers include scanning options but still the laptop couldn't find the router. So although my laptop and router seemed to be working ok they simply could not communicate. Now I was going to take the laptop out and see if I could get connection elsewhere, but I never got a chance because today I turned on the laptop booted into Gentoo and it connected straight away. So my question is this presuming that my hardware is ok is there anything like interference that could have caused this to happen and if so how can I detect interference?

badchien · Guru Joined: 16 Feb 2004 Posts: 415 Location: doghouse

Perhaps someone setup an AP on the same channel during that time? Although I've never seen that prevent a connection completely. Still, have you tried using kismet or something to scan for other AP's in the area which might be or have been interfering?

Did you unlplug/restart your AP at all when you had this problem? I've seen AP's that screwed up or overheated that can be 'fixed' by rebooting them.

pinr · Posted: Fri Nov 18, 2005 7:29 pm Post subject:

Yes I did try unplugging and even resetting the router, but it didn't work. I don't know about kismet I will look into it, however my wireless card doesn't support scanning in Linux so I don't know if it will be of any use. I tried scanning in windows and no networks were found. All in all it looks like it must have been a hardware problem which is likely to resurface.