Problem Maintaining Wireless Connection

[de82]

I bought PC-BSD a few weeks ago and am greatly impressed by it's stability
and efficiency when compared with my old Windows XP OS, but I have
been having a problem with my wireless connection. I am using an
Atheros 5212 wireless card and a Linksys router. I have no problem
activating my wireless card or connecting to the router but for some
reason my connection inevitably deteriorates within 1 minute to half
an hour of surfing. What I mean is that I can no longer connect to
any exterior ports: no http, no ftp, no telnet. I checked my packet
filter settings but /etc/rc.d/pf_rules is blank. I pinged my router
and ran tcpdump to find that the router is receiving my packets, but
does not respond to them. Suspecting that something might be
wrong with my router, I tried to connect to other wireless routers
but met with the same exact problem. This never happened to
me when I was using Windows XP so I can only guess that there is
something wrong with the driver. Is there any way to fix this problem?

[TerryP]

Whats the make/model of the atheros card? I knwo for example the revision my Netgear card is at is said to have connection issues (but has had none from it).


If you're ISP is AT&T or Bellsouth, I suggest getting a new ISP -> I get disconnects regularly and limited to LAN/WLAN connectivity lol.

[de82]

I don't know the make and model or how I would get that information. One thing I have noticed is that the connection drops more quickly when I am surfing graphic rich websites as opposed to plain text ones; as if there were a limit on how many bytes of information I can download before the connection drops. But if there IS a limit, it certainly isn't a constant but varies with each session. Also, when I shutdown my PC after this happens I get the message "Login: Ath0 Device Timeout".

The ISP is QWEST. But even if the ISP is at fault, shouldn't I still be receiving a reply from the router when I ping it?

Thanks for your time.

[TerryP]

As long as the router and the computer are both working correctly yes.

If you have access to one, I would test a different wireless adapter.

[DragnLord]

This sounds like the odd DHCP issue I had with my laptop's wireless. I'll share my problem and fix, maybe it will help.

For some odd reason DHCP will mess up and remove the route and nameserver settings.
My fix for this was relatively simple, manually run dhclient and then kill dhclient after it sets the adapter.