Problems using Netgear WN111v2 with the driver built into the kernel

[Charlie Foxtrot]

Hi Charlie,

You've tried unplugging and reinsertion to get out of this disconnect problem. I seem to remember you have a laptop. Does closing the lid make it suspend/hibernate ? Does the wireless reconnect when you resume ? Have you tried closing the lid as a way either of avoiding or of getting out of this disconnect problem ?


There is one long conversion between some well meaning chap with a problem and an expert. Basically the expert was saying if the chap had a problem he should find out exactly which change in the kernel has introduced it and then maybe the expert would look into it. Ever build the kernel yourself ? Ever done a git bisection ? The chap's problem was a disconnect at start up that was intermittent (like Krishna's). Get one bisect wrong and you're wasting your time.

Have I seen this kind of problem ? May be and I might be able to suggest a work around. I've two old laptop I sometimes use for testing. One has a cheap USB wireless and the other an old PCMCIA card wireless. Last backend I tried testing Debian squeeze installation by using the netinstall from the smallest business card iso. Not recommended. It worked fine but was slow so I left it running overnight. In the morning the wireless connections were dead (both laptops). No way to revive them short of unplugging and reinserting the device and then rescanning to remake the network connection allowing the installation to be completed.

My hypothesis os that if the wireless adapter is idle for a long time it will shut down. It will appear to disconnect from Linux and you need, at least, to unplug and reinsert. No one sees this much because wireless connections are usually idle for long enough.

Open a console and ping your router. Leave the ping running for 48 hours and see if your wireless does not disconnect. If it does not, then install ntp and all ntp to the list of SERVICES in /etc/rc.local. That should keep your wireless up and your time correct.

Forester,

I tried out running knoppix briefly as a live cd on my wife's laptop, but I'm mainly running it installed on the HDD of my old Dell desktop, that's where I'm seeing this problem.

Generally, it does seem like my wireless connection dies when the machine is idle. The first time it ran successfully overnight was when I was running iwevent in a terminal window, which would probably act similar to doing a ping.

However, it has died several times when I was in the middle of surfing the web. Generally it will stay up for 3 or 4 hours at at time. For some reason it's been working for about 28 hours straight now, I'm not sure what's up.

It seems the best way to recover is hit cancel when it prompts for my credentials, which it shouldn't really have to do, since I've saved them in the keyring. This puts the adapter in disconnected mode. I generally have

tail -F /var/log/syslog

running in a terminal window. After all the activity has stopped, I remove and reinsert my adapter and then pick my wireless router from the list. If I remove adapter while linux is trying to use it, it seems to put things in a weird state and I sometimes have to do a reboot to get it to work again.

Thanks,
-Charlie