Network card hangs

Dracnor · Guru Joined: 08 Jun 2003 Posts: 397 Location: Pennsylvania

Hi all! I'm new to Gentoo but loving it. Got everything to work on my system, except for my wireless card...sort of.

I have an Orinoco Gold card in my desktop. I use a PCI to PCMCIA converter (use the yenta_socket for this one). I followed the instructions from other posts and compiled the kernel with PCMCIA wireless support as modules. The card activates OK and brings up the network just fine. The problem is that the network will hang for like 1 minute, and then resume later. It was a real pain trying to emerge KDE because I would have to ctrl-c and then resume the download. Nothing else on the system hangs...just the network. I have gkrellm and took a look at the activity, and it is zero when it hangs...and then it just resumes activity after about one minute. Any clues as to why this would happen??

Here are the modules that I use:

orinoco_cs 5588 1
orinoco 39468 0 [orinoco_cs]
hermes 8068 0 [orinoco_cs orinoco]
ds 8712 1 [orinoco_cs]
yenta_socket 13696 1
pcmcia_core 57280 0 [orinoco_cs ds yenta_socket]

Thanks for the help! BTW, great forum and great OS! :lol:

metalac · Posted: Mon Jun 09, 2003 2:34 am Post subject:

you might want to search trough forums, there is an extensive tread, rather a HOWTO Wirless on laptop, and it doesn't use the kernel modules. You would have to "uncompile" the stuff from the kernel and then emerge pcmcia-cs in order to have it work, but the procedure is simple.

p.s.
sorry I don't have a link, but just search for it, it's there somehwere.
_________________
>>>>> Ignorance is bliss <<<<<

Dracnor · Guru Joined: 08 Jun 2003 Posts: 397 Location: Pennsylvania

Well the thing is my wireless card works OK in RedHat with the exact same modules. Does anyone have any suggestions on troubleshooting software that may help pin down what exactly the problem is. When I ping my dns and gateway about 100 responses get through, and then it will arbitrarily stop responding and pick up again around 120th ICMP response. But it won't tell me that the "lost" pings have timed out, it simply won't display anything. Strange. :?:

cybowolf · n00b Joined: 12 Jul 2003 Posts: 43 Location: San Juan, PR

Just as a quick thought, is it possible that your card is using a fixed rate of maybe 11Mbps, instead of the 'auto' setting? My thought is that maybe it isn't automatically falling back when the throughput decreases (due to occasional interference or whatnot).

You can check/set it with iwconfig. To explicitly set it as auto-fallback, do:
iwconfig ethx rate auto

Not sure if this will help, but it seems at least like it could be a possibility. You could also check in your /var/log/kernel to see if you are getting any errors from your ethx.

-cybowolf

Dracnor · Guru Joined: 08 Jun 2003 Posts: 397 Location: Pennsylvania

cybowolf,
Thanks for the reply. I've tried setting the rate manually and verifying it was on auto. Didn't seem to help

I've also tried a wired card (Realtek NIC), and I have the same problem. I ended up re-installing from a stage 1 install, and everything works. I'm not sure if there was a setting in the kernel the I messed up or what???

BDP

qanuta · n00b Joined: 04 Apr 2003 Posts: 43 Location: NJ, USA

Dracnor,

Did you ever find a resolution to your problem? I am seeing the exact same symptoms as you. Everything works fine in general, but on occaision, the network connection just hangs. I have not been able to identify exactly what causes the hang, but it does indeed cause problems when downloading large files. Thank goodness for "wget -c" or else I'd never get the big files. I have a Netgear MA401 card running under linux-wlan-ng.

Dracnor · Guru Joined: 08 Jun 2003 Posts: 397 Location: Pennsylvania

qanuta,
No, I did not find a resolution to the problem. I performed a stage 1 install and dual boot with linux from scratch. Now everything works. Perhaps there is a conflict with power management? You can try passing boot parameters in grub to turn off acpi.

qanuta · n00b Joined: 04 Apr 2003 Posts: 43 Location: NJ, USA

Everything is working fine now.

After many dead ends, I had a crucial piece of information. My wife's computer, running Win2K, was downloading a large (15MB) file over wireless, and she was complaining that it kept hanging and wouldn't finish. Aha! So maybe it's not Linux after all.

My wireless router is a Linksys BEFW11S4. I went to the linksys site, and lo and behold there is a firmware upgrade from July, and one of the items marked in the Release Notes mentions a bug in ftp and http downloads. After upgrading the firmware (that was a whole ordeal, but also a different story), presto! Works like a champ. As a test, I just downloaded OpenOffice (78MB) in one shot.

I don't know if this helps you out at all, but maybe someone in a search will stumble across this and it will help them out.