Thinkpads Forum

Posted: **Fri Aug 27, 2010 5:56 pm**

I recently installed 10.4 on my t60 and I noticed I am not getting the best performance with my wifi. I am running into problems where I sporadically drop connections, the range isn't so great and at time it there is a delay connecting to websites. Is there any other drivers I could use to help this problem?

Posted: **Fri Aug 27, 2010 7:27 pm**

A couple of options come to mind:

1) Check wireless power settings and try disabling power management:

Code: Select all

> iwconfig wlan0
wlan0     IEEE 802.11abgn  ESSID:"Neutrino"  
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.462 GHz  Access Point: XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
          Bit Rate=1 Mb/s   Tx-Power=15 dBm   
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:on
          Link Quality=70/70  Signal level=-31 dBm  
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

> iwconfig wlan0 power off

2) Use the Windows driver with ndiswrapper.

Posted: **Fri Aug 27, 2010 7:31 pm**

Superego wrote:A couple of options come to mind:

1) Check wireless power settings and try disabling power management:

Code: Select all

> iwconfig wlan0
wlan0     IEEE 802.11abgn  ESSID:"Neutrino"  
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.462 GHz  Access Point: XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
          Bit Rate=1 Mb/s   Tx-Power=15 dBm   
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:on
          Link Quality=70/70  Signal level=-31 dBm  
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

> iwconfig wlan0 power off

2) Use the Windows driver with ndiswrapper.

I am sort of a newbie with ubuntu, do I run "iwconfig wlan0 power off" as a cmd in terminal? And what do you mean use windows driver for ndiswrapper?

Posted: **Sat Aug 28, 2010 1:37 am**

Ndiswrapper is a program that allows you to use the Windows wireless driver in Linux. A lot of the wifi card makers have no support for Linux, which makes finding drivers for them tougher. Ndiswrapper is available in the ubuntu software center. You can probably shag a Thinkpad Intel wireless card on ebay for around $10 if you're inclined. Intel cards have excellent Linux support.

Posted: **Sat Aug 28, 2010 7:37 am**

I still have my old intel abg card, I swapped it out for the atheros. Should I just throw that back in there?

Posted: **Sat Aug 28, 2010 7:49 am**

jp0213x wrote: I am sort of a newbie with ubuntu, do I run "iwconfig wlan0 power off" as a cmd in terminal? And what do you mean use windows driver for ndiswrapper?

Sorry about that...should have explained a little more.

Yes "iwconfig wlan0 power off" is a terminal command. Iwconfig list the current configuration for your wireless device (ifconfig will handle all of your network devices). If you run

Code: Select all

iwconfig -a

you should see something like this:

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>iwconfig 
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

wlan0     IEEE 802.11abgn  ESSID:"Neutrino"  
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.462 GHz  Access Point: 68:7F:74:CA:BC:F0   
          Bit Rate=1 Mb/s   Tx-Power=15 dBm   
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:on
          Link Quality=69/70  Signal level=-41 dBm  
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

Here, wlan0 is my wireless device; yours may differ so double-check...it could be something like ath0. There is also a line there that says

Code: Select all

Power Management:on

indicating that my wireless is running with power management on.
To turn it off, and hopefully improve your signal, run this command (as root or sudo)

Code: Select all

iwconfig wlan0 power off

You check that it worked by running iwconfig again.

This may or may not help, but it might be a good start before trying different drivers or ndiswrapper. If you find that it does help you can add the "iwconfig wlan0 power off" command to wherever you have other startup commands....most likely /etc/rc.local

What driver are you using? I'm wondering if you're using an up-to-date driver.

Posted: **Sat Aug 28, 2010 11:13 am**

I would actually recommend *against* using NDISwrapper unless absolutely necessary. Although it's a lot better than it used to be, it still has a number of bugs and is frequently a source of stability issues.

Generally if your card has native Linux drivers available it's best to use those. Realtek cards are pretty much the only exception I've seen to that rule, and that's only because their closed-source native drivers suck ever-so-slightly more than their Windows drivers.

Power management shouldn't have anything to do with range. It will affect latency and (possibly) throughput, but range shouldn't be affected *unless* you screwed around with transmit power.

Posted: **Sat Aug 28, 2010 11:52 am**

How can I tell if I have the most up to date driver?

Posted: **Sat Aug 28, 2010 12:26 pm**

jp0213x wrote:I still have my old intel abg card, I swapped it out for the atheros. Should I just throw that back in there?

You can try if you like. It won't hurt anything. Is it a Thinkpad card? If not, it most likely work without a BIOS hack.

Posted: **Sat Aug 28, 2010 12:47 pm**

Its a thinkpad card so no need for a bios hack. I swapped it out with my intel card.

Posted: **Sat Aug 28, 2010 5:49 pm**

jp0213x wrote:How can I tell if I have the most up to date driver?

The driver is included with the kernel. Unless you really feel like messing about with your kernel (my advice: you shouldn't), just go with the stock Ubuntu one. It's relatively stable and fairly recent, so there's no need to worry about it.

The "check if you have the most up-to-date driver" advice is usually more of a Windows tip than a Linux one -- on the Linux side of things you should probably leave it up to your distro to make sure that your hardware is supported properly.

(Disclaimer: if you know enough to know why my advice above isn't 100% accurate, you also know why I'm simplifying things a bit.

)

Posted: **Sun Aug 29, 2010 2:30 pm**

It appears power management is already off.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11abgn ESSID:"Heath St"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point: 00:1C:F0:EF:90:5A
Bit Rate=54 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=70/70 Signal level=-32 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

Posted: **Sun Aug 29, 2010 6:42 pm**

I'd wonder if it's not something with your access point.

You had performance/range problems with it a couple years ago, no? Since those issues were with an Intel card, and these issues are with an Atheros one, the only constant here is your AP.

Posted: **Sun Aug 29, 2010 9:32 pm**

I didn't have many problems with the intel card, I only got the atheros card because I was planning on building a hackintosh. That project got scrapped and decided to give ubuntu another try. I don't know if its a driver thing or my AP is picky with the cards. I've had experience where certain AP didn't didn't work well with certain wireless card. I have using a dlink dir-655 by the way, the range isn't the best but my apartment isn't that big. I should be able to maintain a good signal through out the apt. I noticed with my atheros card performance wasn't all that great at times in other parts of my apt where as the intel was fine.

Posted: **Mon Aug 30, 2010 11:41 am**

jp0213x wrote:I didn't have many problems with the intel card, I only got the atheros card because I was planning on building a hackintosh. That project got scrapped and decided to give ubuntu another try. I don't know if its a driver thing or my AP is picky with the cards. I've had experience where certain AP didn't didn't work well with certain wireless card. I have using a dlink dir-655 by the way, the range isn't the best but my apartment isn't that big. I should be able to maintain a good signal through out the apt. I noticed with my atheros card performance wasn't all that great at times in other parts of my apt where as the intel was fine.

Well I'd suspect the AP. The fact that D-Link makes it gives me even more reason to be suspicious of it.

Posted: **Mon Aug 30, 2010 3:41 pm**

Are you not a fan of dlink? I had a similar problem with my linksys wrt54g way back when, that is one of the reasons I switched over.

Posted: **Tue Aug 31, 2010 9:34 am**

jp0213x wrote:Are you not a fan of dlink? I had a similar problem with my linksys wrt54g way back when, that is one of the reasons I switched over.

Not at all. In my experience they make horribly unreliable gear.

It's too bad you switched from the WRT54G. While the stock firmware isn't all that hot, the early units and the WRT54GS are some of the best 802.11g APs out there when flashed with something like Tomato. Mine has been running Tomato for well over a year with absolutely no problems -- and that's with full QoS support, RADIUS authentication, a small web server, a SPI firewall, NAT support, a caching DNS server, and even OpenVPN for WAN security.

Posted: **Tue Aug 31, 2010 3:57 pm**

I still have my wrt54g, I stopped using it because some of the ports stopped working. I have one of the earlier aps, maybe I can put it back to use. Is tomato some kind of hacked firmware? I think I have a wrt54gv2

Posted: **Tue Aug 31, 2010 7:46 pm**

jp0213x wrote:I still have my wrt54g, I stopped using it because some of the ports stopped working. I have one of the earlier aps, maybe I can put it back to use. Is tomato some kind of hacked firmware? I think I have a wrt54gv2

It's not "hacked". It's simply another Linux-based firmware for the device.

The WRT54G v2 should work fine with it. You can grab a copy here.

Posted: **Tue Aug 31, 2010 11:35 pm**

So I was able to get the firmware loaded to my wrt54g. I set up up wireless bridge with my d link so I am going to test my atheros card.

Posted: **Wed Sep 01, 2010 2:20 am**

Slightly oot, but I'm using a wrt54gl with Tomato since 2006 and it works great! At the beginning I was using DD-WRT but was too complex for me

, so I switched to Tomato around 2008...

Posted: **Wed Sep 01, 2010 2:31 pm**

Tasurinchi wrote:DD-WRT but was too complex for me , so I switched to Tomato around 2008...

In addition to being illegal (yes, DD-WRT includes numerous copyright and license violations and is in no way an "open source" firmware), I've found DD-WRT to be buggy, unstable, and insecure.

Tomato doesn't support every last bell and whistle that DD-WRT does, but on the other hand I've never run into a situation where it was missing a feature that I needed.

Posted: **Wed Sep 01, 2010 2:45 pm**

ThinkRob wrote:In addition to being illegal

Oh dear... I'm then more glad that I moved to Tomato...

Posted: **Thu Sep 02, 2010 5:25 pm**

I noticed this tomato firmware is limiting my bandwidth, I have 60mb connection, and I am only getting less then 2mb per sec. Is there any configure I need to fix?

Posted: **Thu Sep 02, 2010 6:04 pm**

jp0213x wrote:I noticed this tomato firmware is limiting my bandwidth, I have 60mb connection, and I am only getting less then 2mb per sec. Is there any configure I need to fix?

Megabit or megabyte?

Posted: **Thu Sep 02, 2010 8:39 pm**

So I i get around 3.58 megabytes. Does this router have a hardware limitation on the wan port? If this is the case this firmware won't do me any good.

Posted: **Fri Sep 03, 2010 7:47 pm**

jp0213x wrote:So I i get around 3.58 megabytes. Does this router have a hardware limitation on the wan port? If this is the case this firmware won't do me any good.

That's about 28 megabits, which isn't too far from what I'd expect for real-world sustained throughput for a 802.11g network.

What sort of testing are you doing?

Posted: **Sun Sep 05, 2010 11:51 pm**

I have 60/10 connection, I don't think my old 10/100 linksys can handle those kind of speeds because I max out around 3.50 megabytes via wan port not wireless. Sorry the topic has changed since I found out that I could load tomato firmware on my old wrt54g v2. I was so ready to put the dlink aside for a bit and use the linksys but I wasn't getting all of the bandwidth I pay for. I am thinking about using it as a bridge to run off the dlink.

As for the testing, I wanted to see if my atheros card would work any better with my old linksys using the tomato firmware. Unfortunately the wireless performance is the same as the dlink.

Posted: **Mon Sep 06, 2010 11:33 am**

jp0213x wrote: As for the testing, I wanted to see if my atheros card would work any better with my old linksys using the tomato firmware. Unfortunately the wireless performance is the same as the dlink.

Well that rules out the AP then. Perhaps it's the card? I don't have any experience with that particular Atheros card, but I did have good experiences with an Atheros 802.11b/g card in my X61s -- I had no problem hitting close to max. throughput.

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