[lug] When to try rebooting Linux

[Daniel Webb]

On Wed, 1 Sep 2004, Nate Duehr wrote:

> WIth this one, restarting the entire PCMCIA subsystem usually clears
> this.  If the distro has really badly written network start/stop
> scripts, you may have to tweak around a bit with those or manually
> bring up an interface afterward, but haven't run into any wireless
> cards yet that needed a complete reboot.

I'm definitely not a guru, so I'm not exactly sure how to make this happen
when I get a "device or resource busy" when doing "/etc/init.d/pcmcia
stop".  This just happened this morning, and I tried kill -9 everything
that might be using networking, and it still wouldn't unload.

The wireless networking is acting very stragely.  It will connect fine for
a while, then suddenly I get very long ping times (1-2 seconds and 50%
packet loss) even though the signal is -32dB and the noise is -90dB.  It
will show the WEP key turning off by itself (as reported by iwconfig).
syslog shows "Access point out of range" followed by "access point in
range" over and over.  I have tried with several identical wireless cards
(orinoco gold with hermes chipset), and it's all the same.  I'm using an
Actiontec GT701-WG which comes with Qwest DSL nowadays, and set it to
802.11b only.  I'm switching to a netgear AP to see if that makes a
difference, and so far it's working... but so did the other setup for a
while.

I've had similar problems in the past with wireless and Linux, and it only
seems to happen when I'm using WEP.  Is WEP support in Linux screwy?

Daniel