[TriLUG] Is My Wireless Card Bad?

[David Rasch]

Randy,  

What chipset is your wireless interface?  There are several of us with
Thinkpad T42's and use the ipw2200 driver under ubuntu and have each
complained about similar symptoms at one time or another.  I know that
David McD compiled a new driver/firmware for his system.  He'll have to
report on its reliability.

-David

On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 10:44:25PM -0400, Randall Barlow <rpbarlow at ncsu.edu> wrote:
> I've been having a strange issue with the wireless network connection on 
> my laptop.  As you can tell from some of my recent posts, I recently 
> switched my laptop to Ubuntu from Windows.  The primary problem that 
> stimulated the move was that I could not get my wireless card to stay 
> connected to our home network, or any network for that matter.  It had 
> been working for about 10 months with no problems before this, and all 
> of a sudden it crapped out.  I tried reinstalling the driver, and 
> nothing seemed to fix the problem.
> 
> So I switched to Ubuntu, and it worked... for a while.  Now I'm having 
> similar problems again.  If I reboot the machine, it will connect to my 
> home router (using WEP).  After a while (could be 5 minutes, could be 2 
> hours) it will lose the connection, and I won't be able to get it to 
> connect to any network (not even any of my neighbors unencrypted 
> routers) unless I reboot the computer (shutdown, power on because Ubuntu 
> won't reboot for some reason, a whole other problem altogether).
> 
> Something interesting to me is that I can still use iwlist to see the 
> access points in the area, including the one that I want to connect to.  
> Here is that iwconfig returns when the connection is working:
> 
> eth0      IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:"BETA"
>          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.447 GHz  Access Point: 00:09:5B:E9:90:A8
>          Bit Rate=54 Mb/s   Tx-Power=20 dBm
>          RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
>          Power Management:off
>          Link Quality=100/100  Signal level=-35 dBm  Noise level=-88 dBm
>          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
>          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0
> 
> And when it's not:
> 
> eth0      unassociated  ESSID:"BETA"
>          Mode:Managed  Channel=0  Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
>          Bit Rate=0 kb/s   Tx-Power=20 dBm
>          RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
>          Power Management:off
>          Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
>          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
>          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0
> 
>    So, any ideas of what the problem could be?  My suspicion is 
> hardware failure only because I was having similar problems before in 
> Windows.  Is there any way to test if this is the problem?  The computer 
> is still under warranty from Best Buy, so I could take it to them, but I 
> suspect they'll say, "Linux, what?" and attribute the problem to that 
> and be done with it.  Any advice or experience here?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Randy Barlow who's sorry for the high volume of posts to the list he's 
> made lately
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