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GNUser

Member

Registered: 2017-03-16

Posts: 570  

dropped wifi connections on both wicd and network-manager

When I first installed Devuan on my laptop, I chose wicd as my network manager. About once an hour or so, wicd would randomly drop my connection.

I thought wicd was the culprit, so I purged it and installed network-manager. Things seem better now, but I'm still experiencing an occasional dropped connection (1-3 times a day).

I'm perplexed because when I ran Debian 8 on this same laptop I never experienced a dropped wifi connection. Maybe I'm experiencing a subtle issue that is Devuan-specific?

My laptop is a T400 with an Atheros AR9285 wireless network adapter. I'm running the default kernel (3.16.43-2).

Is anyone else experiencing occasional, seemingly random dropped wifi connections? Any advice on how to solve this or begin troubleshooting? I'm a bash pro but networking and hardware are my weakest areas.

Last edited by GNUser (2017-05-24 14:05:50)

smoki

Member

Registered: 2017-05-15

Posts: 56  

Re: dropped wifi connections on both wicd and network-manager

Searching a bit on AR9285 show long history of sudden dropped connections:

https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comment … _debian_8/
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2296648
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2226484
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2129841
https://askubuntu.com/questions/118023/ … 20-minutes
...

Seems on average most suggest checking router to be on WPA2 encryption and some suggest kernel parameter nohwcrypt=1

Last edited by smoki (2017-05-24 14:55:26)

GNUser

Member

Registered: 2017-03-16

Posts: 570  

Re: dropped wifi connections on both wicd and network-manager

Thank you very much, smoki. I will check the encryption setting on the routers I control. Also, I added the nohwcrypt=1 parameter to ath9k as suggested. So far, so good ::fingers crossed::

GNUser

Member

Registered: 2017-03-16

Posts: 570  

Re: dropped wifi connections on both wicd and network-manager

I'm still having dropped wifi connections at least daily, despite using nohwcrypt=1.

Nevertheless, this may be a red herring and totally unrelated to Devuan, wicd, or network-manager: Our VPN provider made some recent changes right around the time I switched to Devuan. I have updated the VPN configuration in our routers.

Sorry for the noise.

Last edited by GNUser (2017-05-31 14:04:42)