The freeze on wireless networking
At present I’m trying to solve an issue with the wireless lan causing the entire system to freeze up at the point it picks up an IP address.
Still yet to find anywhere online that mentions the problem, but it would be nice to see me rip the guts out of it and start again.
The site above though did provide a good intro to wireless components on linux. I’m starting to get my head around the wireless tools commands (they are in /usr/sbin instead of regular /sbin/
I did try a variety of things. The only thing I could pinpoint was that I could establish a connection to the Access Point, it was only freezing on obtaining an IP address. I had made a change to my router as well specifying the DNS addresses to divy out instead of relying on the defaults that I get from PPPoE session it establishes automatically – Could that be causing the problem? Well, not really, because I was still getting freezes when I was on the train… perhaps picking up someone else’s access point, not uncommon on my train line.
Initially the device was set to activate At Boot Time which is why I couldn’t even launch KDE with the wireless card switched on. After starting the laptop with the wireless card switched off, changing the start device to MANUAL alieviated the boot time crash.
Using YAST, I changed a few more settings. First I specified a static IP address. I noticed that the MTU setting had been removed entirely, so I set that back to 1500 (not sure of the suitability of this value on a wireless connection but oh well). I changed the activation to Hot Plug which is close enough to AtBootTime but the documentation claims to be a bit less of a crybaby when things go wrong. Because I suspected the DNS to be the problem to, I specified the DNS servers in the Host and Routing prefs rather than let DHCP find them.
Using Kinternet, I reestablished the connection. To my suprise it connected, used the IP’s I had assigned it. The only problem was that I couldn’t resolve domain names, I could only ping my router and computers on my network.
I went back in, set the DNS to obtain values via DHCP and so far, so good.