[ale] 2 wifi issues

[Alex Carver]

It's most likely a combination of security settings, driver issues (on
both the Win 7 and the tablet) and the access point and getting to the
bottom of it will just make you tear your hair out.

I have an old Linksys WRT54G (version 1.1) running OpenWRT.  For a while
everything worked fine.  Then I changed the settings on a Debian laptop
with a Linksys PCMCIA wireless card and my Samsung S4 phone to increase
the key strength (with matching key on the AP).  Suddenly, anytime the
laptop was on for an extended period of time, it would cause the router
to reboot.  I could leave the S4 on wifi (plugged in of course) all day
and night with no trouble but if the laptop stayed up for longer than
about 10 hours (also plugged in) the router would die and reboot while
the laptop would show tons of errors in the logs (usually during group
rekeying there would be a random disconnect event, enough of those would
end up blowing out the router).

I brought up an old Meraki Mini also with OpenWRT to act as an access
point and moved the laptop to it.  After that the router stopped
crashing (the S4 still uses the Linksys router) and the laptop no longer
has issues.

On 2015-03-22 09:15, Pete Hardie wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 11:33 AM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>
>> On Mar 22, 2015 11:07 AM, "Pete Hardie" <pete.hardie at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hello all,
>>>
>>> My Google-fu is weak for these issues:
>>>
>>> 1) my son has a Windows 7 laptop, and when he shuts it down, it screws
>> up the wifi in the house for a few minutes - everything loses connection
>> and cannot reconnect for a while.
>>
>> Possibly box is set to share wifi connection with other systems. So it
>> looks like an access point? Or the power down process dumps garbage to the
>> radio and that scrambles everything. Very strange. Try shutting down
>> wireless before power down to see what happens.
>>
> 
> ​I doubt it's a shared connection, since everyone else connects to the home
> network before the laptop is started, but has the issue on shutdown.  I'll
> see if we can alter the sequence to try and locate the crux.​
> 
> 
>> Can windows shutdown sequence be altered? I've never had to look at that.
>> I usually just hold the power button down until it dies. Yeah. I don't care
>> if the windows stuff works later.
>>>
>>> 2) I hve an el-checpo Azpen 7in tablet, and when it connects with wifi,
>> my wife complains her laptop wifi is messed up.
>>
>> I've seen this when cheap device is physically between AP and laptop.
>> Cheapo eats most of the bandwidth with retransmission due to a crappy
>> radio. Only fix is a multi spectrum AP and assign cheapo to the 80211b band.
>>
> 
> ​That's a good suggestion,​
> 
> ​I might be able to do that, or a separate network​ altogether.  Thanks!
> 
>>
>>> I was unable to find anything specific about either on the web, but I
>> was not getting results that even seemed to be similar problems, so I'm
>> asking for help in either finding a query that gets me answers, or finding
>> out what I can install and learn about that will let me troubleshoot the
>> issue directly.
>>>
>>> TIA,