[SOLVED] Unstable connection with wireless router using rt73

Question

I'm using the rt2x00 wireless driver for my rt73 based dongle and I'm on the latest (stock) kernel 2.6.31-6.
On startup my wireless connection behaves normal. Here's the output of iwconfig :
wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:"dlink"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.417 GHz Access Point: 00:1C:F0:C5:C7:0B
Bit Rate=54 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:on
Link Quality=44/70 Signal level=-66 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
Now after some time (15 minutes, half an hour, an hour or sometimes even after 5 minutes) my connection between the dongle and my wireless router gets lost and it sometimes reconnects automatically, sometimes not. In my browser I frequently get an error that my connection is lost. However, if I 'reload' the web page after that I almost instantly get the demanded page. Another option is to restart my wireless network using '/etc/rc.d/net-profiles restart'.
Here's an output of pinging my wireless router that describes the above behavior :
chris@megatron ~]$ ping -v 192.168.0.1
PING 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=4999 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=4000 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=3001 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=2001 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=64 time=1001 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=6 ttl=64 time=1.95 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=7 ttl=64 time=0.561 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=8 ttl=64 time=2.89 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=9 ttl=64 time=1.99 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=10 ttl=64 time=2.74 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=11 ttl=64 time=2.78 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=12 ttl=64 time=2.77 ms
dmesg does not output anything special about my rt73.
What's happening ? Is there any way I can get more verbose output for my problem ?
Thanks in advance.
Last edited by Strider (2009-12-14 21:05:23)

Answer 1

Ok, I think I solved the problem.
I did two things :
1) switch from wpa to wpa2 (made new netcfg profile); I do not know if that helps much but I changed it since my router (a DLINK 635 wireless N) advises to so since this augments performance compared to a configuration that needs to support both wpa and wpa2.
2) rebooted my rooter the moment I encountered the connection problem. The router is configured to automatically switch the best channel available. It switched from channel 1 to 7. Apparently there was interference on channel 1 (probably because of wireless network of one of my neighbors ...).
For some strange reason the combination of these two make my network stable now. I'll cross my fingers and hope this does not happen again anymore...
Last edited by Strider (2009-12-14 21:04:08)