Hi,

i've a lot of trouble with my WRT54G. Since summer my connection to my WRT54G 1.1 is interrupted very often, usually about 10 times an hour.
I found out that it hasn't anything to do with the clients; I tried it with 3 boxes (all using different wlan-cards) and everyone had the same problems.

Well, therefore I tried to upgrade my OpenWRT version. The old one was from august or so, so I put the snapshot of 12-30-2004 on it. I've still got the same problems.

Do you have any ideas how to fix this?

phil

Isn't there someone near you emitting on a near channel ?

No.
I already changed the channel but this didn't help.

Such a shame.

Do you use a wl txpwr value in order to boost your power ?

Don't you have a package which has a crontab that makes the router reboot ?

No, I don't boost the power.
There isn't a crontab either. (My uptime is about 10 days or so)

I am also facing similar problem, though not that frequently. My wireless connection dies around 10 times in a day. It's not any crontab script for sure. I have also tried changing every channel. But this happens at any frequency, so doesn't look like an interference issue.

If someone else also have had similar problem and know some solution to this, please post.

Thanks,
-Manu

---------
Manu Garg
http://manugarg.freezope.org
"I don't give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it is hell." - Mark Twain

I'm experiencing something similiar. In my case I have two systems connected wirelessly- one is Windows XP SP2 and the other is Mac OS X (whatever the latest patch level is). The XP box regularly loses connection, although occasionally I can make it overnight without dropping. The Mac OS X box has never had a problem and in a time when the XP was flaking the Mac laptop was just fine.

In my case I recently replaced an older vanilla 802.11b linksys which was running perfectly in this environment. At the same time I also upgraded to an 802.11G NIC from Linksys in the XP box. I will be doing the following two tests to see if I can isolate this:

1) Rolling back to the older Avaya 802.11B card
2) Rolling the WRT54G back to the Linksys firmware

It would be helpful to hear from others on which OS and hardware your problems are occurring.

My problems are occuring with a Netgear WG511 on a WinXP (SP2) Notebook and on a Notebook with Debian Sarge, using a IPN2220 Card.

In my case reverting back to the original firmware hasn't changed anything.

I've found that on OpenWRT the command
"wl roamtrigger -90" seems to help a bit. It seems that a WRT in client mode will attempt to rescan every now and again, if the RSSI goes beyond -70.

Setting it to -90 has made my client-mode AP's behave better. What you could also try is "wl scansuppress 1" which will suppress all automatic scans by the AP.

I've found that the link dies for a few seconds, when the AP's try to scan.

YMMV.

I am seeing the same problem; but I'm not sure if my configuration is different...

I have two WRT54G boxes running in WDS mode; the "client" box is used to bridge wireless and wired ethernet into another room.  Most of the time it works fine, but sporadically it just drops connection for both wireless and ethernet, and takes several seconds for connectivity to come back to the client box.  The WLAN light on the client box stays lit solid during this time, and all switch traffic times out.  The RSSI between the two associated APs is in the -60 range.

I am running both syslogd and klogd so messages are logged to /var/log/messages, and the logs don't show that anything happened during this "disconnect" time.

Is there a way to enabling the logging of wireless associations/operation to the syslog?  (Might be handy to try to track down what is going on..)

Would the "scan disable" settings mentioned by TheRoDent above help for APs in WDS mode?

Thanks!!

Originally I had a linksys BEFW11S4 v.2 2.4Ghz AP and the windows client on an ORiNOCO PCMCIA card in a PCI adapter. This configuration worked flawlessly (or at least so well that I never really thought about the network).

When I bought the first WRT54G I also bought a linksys G vanilla PCI card (no speedboost). I upgraded both components and the network was not ever stable. I tried changing channels, tried moving things around, tried independently disabling B vs G mode. Eventually I decided it would be worth the risk to get a WRT54GS as there are other places I could use both units if they don't work in my home. This didn't change anything so I could pretty well rule out a flaky radio in the AP.

I put the old linksys BEFW 11b AP back into place and kept the new G card- still the connection was flaky, lasting at best 2 hours (this is with the latest greatest linksys firmware- this problem is NOT inherent to OpenWRT). Note that in every case running "Repair" on the connection from windows systray is almost always sufficient to restore (I think in ~ 50 repairs now it's failed twice).

I fully reverted to my original configuration of the BEFW and ORiNOCO card and once again the network is stable- no disconnects or need to run repair.

From extended ping tests I see regular packet loss with all combinations of cards/APs I've tried. I'm in a high density area and I see lots of other APs- there's definitely interference that is the likely culprit and it doesn't matter what channel I use (I only tried 1 6 11).

It seems that perhaps it is just the driver that is causing the disconnects since the packet loss rates seem about the same. The only difference I see is that with both the linksys G card and WRT54G together I see some very high latencies at about the same interval as the losses- it is almost as if packets that would be dropped otherwise are received with over 1 second latency.

My very last attempt at using the WRT at home is to keep the older ORiNOCO 802.11b card with the WRT54GS. So far so good:

Ping statistics for 192.168.1.1:
    Packets: Sent = 4706, Received = 4627, Lost = 79 (1% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 2ms, Maximum = 86ms, Average = 2ms

That is about the same packet loss I'll see with any combination of card <-> AP.

Also I have noticed this loss from my OS X laptop even in the same room as the AP- but that OS never seems to indicate any loss of association.

At various times on the Windows side I tried:

- enabling/disabling UPnP
- enabling/disabling firewall
- hard-coding my IP address etc.

Nothing seemed to make a difference- when the linksys PCI G card was installed I could not keep the wifi connected more than an hour or two best.