Thinkpads Forum

I've found some information about broken wireless in these forums but I'm not sure if this is the same problem others have been having or not. Seems that IBM/Lenovo went wrong somewhere in the whole wireless realm.

I recently purchased a T60 with the Intel 3945ABG wireless, and I love everything except the wireless. And I even love the wireless at home or at work. It's school where it craps out.

At home I have a WPA-PSK network, at work a WEP network and I've set up profiles in AC for work, home, and school, and the work and home ones work flawlessly. When I boot up at home, it tries my profiles in the order I specified and it connects fine. Works perfectly, I can switch on and off the wireless with Fn-F5 or the main "radio on/off" switch, I can try to select another profile, move back to home profile, works as it should. At work, same results.

At school, however, where the network is open-access (you have to register your MAC with the university to get a non-private IP) I boot up the laptop, and sometimes AC pops up and goes through the list of profiles sometimes it doesn't. If it doesn't then the wireless is completely non-functional until a reboot. If it does, then the following happens at some random time:
1) Any programs using network fail to find their host. AC, windows network connections control panel, Fn-F5, ipconfig stop responding.
2) The wireless status light goes out.
3) No amount of clicking, killing, restarting programs regains wireless functionality.
4) I restart, and gamble again how long this process will take.

It's infuriating because at school I am mostly concerned with taking notes on my laptop and do not particularly have time to troubleshoot the problem, but at home and work I do not have a problem, so when I have time, troubleshooting is just worthless until I get to try my "fix" the next day. Furthermore, if there were network issues at the University I would imagine that I would have experienced problems with my last laptop, and I wouldn't imagine that network problems would make MY wireless drivers/software stop working.

If anyone could give insight, should I try the suggestions of basically "cleaning" all the wireless stuff and reinstalling, should I yell at the university, or any other suggestions I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,
--Jason

Have you read through the FAQ in the Access Connections help file?

If you are using a static/fixed IP anywhere, you definitely should read it!

Cheers,

Bill B.

No, it's not static IP anywhere. The University still uses DHCP (or the like) to give you a dynamic IP, but you are given an IP on the private network unless you have registered your MAC with the school.

Possible new developments:

Removing Access Connections and the profiles and using windows to manage the connection had no positive effect. I've tried "uninstalling" the wireless driver and clean installing the newest Lenovo provided driver.

I really thought that maybe the GNUPG "dirmgr" service (having to do with LDAP, something I don't use/need; I'm fairly suprised this was installed without my knowledge, but that's beside the point), which was locking up, may be at the root of these problems, but alas, not the case.

I've found the following entries in the "c:/swshare/system.log" file, I have no idea where this file comes from but it appears to have some useful information. Sorry for the poor formatting of the information, but my wireless is probably about to die.

<type>W</type><date>2008/02/22</date><time>11:45:58</time>
<source>Dhcp</source><cat>None</cat><eid>EID</eid><user>N/A</user><comp>HOSTNAME</comp>
<string>Your computer was not able to renew its address from the network (from the
DHCP Server) for the Network Card with network address XXXXXXXXXX. The following
error occurred:
The semaphore timeout period has expired..
Your computer will continue to try and obtain an address on its own from
the network address (DHCP) server.
</string><data>79000000</data><recNum>5017</recNum>
<type>E</type><date>2008/02/22</date><time>11:45:58</time>
<source>Dhcp</source><cat>None</cat><eid>EID</eid><user>N/A</user><comp>HOSTNAME</comp>
<string>Your computer has lost the lease to its IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx on the
Network Card with network address xxxxxxxxxx.
</string><data></data><recNum>5018</recNum>
<type>E</type><date>2008/02/22</date><time>11:46:43</time>
<source>ipnathlp</source><cat>None</cat><eid>EID</eid><user>N/A</user><comp>HOSTNAME</comp>
<string>The Network Address Translator (NAT) was unable to request an operation
of the kernel-mode translation module.
This may indicate misconfiguration, insufficient resources, or
an internal error.
The data is the error code.
</string><data>1f000000</data><recNum>5019</recNum>

At other times when the wireless fails, I've seen the "semaphore timeout" message, sometimes repeated several times, but this was the only area I saw the NAT and lease lost messages (so far, I've continued to peruse this when the network goes down).

Anyone that can shed any light on this, I would be very grateful as well as far less irritated.

I also tried to set (trough the Intel driver tabs) the wireless mode to "B" only, as I saw in another thread, but this did not help.

Thanks
--Jason

Also, as I have seen in other areas, I tried uninstalling the thinkpad power management stuff, no help there either.