wireless woes

  • Posted by Shellie
  • Tuesday, October 3, 2006

The wireless network I’m trying to maintain is going to be the death of me.  Customers are furious at the level of uptime.  Connections are randomly dropped and reconnected.  This wouldn’t be too disruptive if they were using more of the local machine’s power.  However, everything they do is over the network via a telnet like connection (it’s not telnet).  When the connection drops so does their work.  Starting over is only forgivable so many times before a revolt takes place.

I guess my question to geeks everywhere is how do you test this?  Sure I can ping forever and see a dropped packet here and there or even a dropped connection but I already believe them that it’s happening.  How do I test further?  What do I test for?  What am I looking for?  How do I narrow down the scope of the issue?  And I guess more importantly, is this normal?  Is wireless just unstable?

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October 3rd, 2006
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Comment Number:
1
Written by:
Tony Dye
Posted on:
Wednesday, October 18, 2006 at 4:32 pm

Shellie, this may be way off from your problem, but it’s worth asking. Do you have areas where two or more different APs, ON THE SAME CHANNEL (or group), give strong coverage? That can cause some craziness at your switch which might generate the kinds of problems you’re seeing.

Comment Number:
2
Written by:
Shellie
Posted on:
Thursday, October 19, 2006 at 10:13 pm

Actually, that is possible. The network was installed for us. I know that was supposed to have been a consideration, but we are very AP heavy. I think we have too many. Plus, I wonder about 3d coverage. I’m certain they took into account about AP’s on the same floor having the same channel but I’m not confident AP’s on the floors above or below aren’t conflicting.