[vox-tech] Nursing home wi-fi mystery

[Chris Jenks]

On Wed, 6 May 2015, Rod Roark wrote:

> On 05/06/2015 11:39 AM, Chris Jenks wrote:
>>   I've seen this sort of problem a lot of places, even at CalEPA where
>> I work. I don't know why this happens, and it can waste a lot of time.
>> I programmed my own Linksys routers with OpenWRT so they aren't
>> representative, but I found that they would sometimes go offline when
>> traffic was heavy and require manual reboot. So I wonder if whether
>> your wifi router is rebooting could be tested by seeing if two
>> connections to it would be lost at the same time?
>
> That's an interesting idea, thanks.  In the meantime I'm rummaging
> through syslog to find out what AP MAC addresses the wlan0 interface has
> been authenticating with.  Seems the last authentication timed out and
> it then authenticated with a different one.  If that sticks it will be a
> pretty good clue that the first AP is bad.
>
> By the way I figured out how to get a ssh reverse tunnel going so I can
> keep tabs on it from home.  :)

   So maybe the bad AP reboots and the disconnected netbook connects to a 
more distant AP. Then the bad AP comes back online and the netbook 
reconnects, but before the bad AP was really ready so the connection stays 
dead until the networking is restarted on the netbook?

   Reverse tunneling is lots of fun, especially with the -X option. It's 
like having a computer while getting to give it away too! :)

   - Chris