[vox-tech] Nursing home wi-fi mystery

[Rod Roark]

On 05/06/2015 12:19 PM, Chris Jenks wrote:
>
> 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! :)

So... problem fixed, I think.  I changed /etc/network/interfaces to
force selection of a different access point by MAC address.  Not sure if
they moved APs around, but it also seems to be the one with the
strongest signal now.  Maybe the problem AP just wasn't close enough and
for some reason Debian wasn't doing a good job of picking the best one...?

By the way MagicJack doesn't have any special support for Linux.  What I
did was configure the netbook as a masquerading router to send packets
from the ethernet interface to the wireless interface and back.

Anybody know any good apps for the elderly? :)