Isn't wireless networking lovely?

[Toro]

at least when it works all the time.

As some of you may or may not know i have a wireless network set up in this here flat of mine, so that i didnt need to lay cables and my flatmate and I could happily share the wonderful internet connection that we have available to us. It works without incident for the most part, but every so often my flatmate's machine fails to connect to the network. It decects that there is a wireless network available. Mine works 99.999999% of the time, the times when it does is when its switched off (funny that). We are both using Belkin 54g Wireless Cards, connecting to a Belkin wireless 54g router, sounds good to me! the only differences between my flat mates set up and mine, with regards to network set up is I'm on XP, hes on Win98, and situated the other side of the router from me, about equal distances going thru the same amount of wall.

I have tried rebooting, this sometimes fixes it, sometimes will take 5 reboots or so, hardly satisfactory though, i think you would agree

If anyone has any suggestions as to a solution, I will listen to all ideas, so no need to be shy! (ps unless getting rid of win98 is the solution, not really an option at this time )

many thanks in advance

[danrok]

Can you see what the signal strength is on both machines? Is it the same?

[Toro]

thanks for quick response danrok

signal strength on win98 machine is -43dBm
" " " winXP " " -44dBm

not much to write home about i would assume?

[danrok]

Tried switching the cards between the two machines?

[Toro]

the thought has just crossed my mind as i was tinkering with it to see if it would work (it didnt) will need to try that out another day, work in the morning

so its now completly powered down, going to leave it like that for a bit, and try again a wee bitty later

[Toro]

well i tried later and it as soon as it had completed booting, it was up and running. I'm wondering if there is a heat issue, but i cant see how there would be, the side of the case isnt attatched...

[surlyjoe]

you should try running static and register the IP's or MAC addresses of the machines in the router, they don't always do DHCP they way they are supposed to.

[dsio]

802.11G was developed as a standard, but not a reliable standard. :\
the quality of belkin hardware is questionable. I wouldnt really trust it. Secondly have you kept your firmware up to date on the router, and have you kept drivers up to date on the adapters.

As good as wireless gets, wired will always be far better than it. Just for reliability. On reliability, i have a mail server here running off 802.11B and i decided that instead of running a single high end card, i would run 2 el cheapos from different brands in it. I have never ever had a signal loss from that machine and its been up for around 2 years. Redundancey helps.

[dsio]

and by the way, Joe has a point there: wireless routers and APs have severe DHCP issues. More so when roaming between APs but sometimes just in associating after a drop in a single AP setup as well. Static IPs do help.

[danrok]

I always use static IP's wireless or not, can save alot of hassle with port forwarding and the like.

[Toro]

i did have it set so that only the 2 wireless network cards could access it, using MAC addresses, but it screwed up and i couldnt get back into it, cos i forgot to have backup with a ethernet card, mistake made, lesson learned. will do that on thursday on my day off, \o/


as well as doing washing up

[drow_elf]

I've actually had this problem quite a bit on my network. I think its some sort of driver issue. Basically, when it goes down go to the properties page for the adapter (device manager > belkin 54g adapter) and under advanced fiddle with the IBSS channel number. It doesnt really matter what you set it to, it scans all the channels anyway it seems. Doing this each time the network goes down fixes the problem for me, at least.