On Tuesday, May 28, 2013 05:41:07 PM John Andersen wrote:

On 5/28/2013 5:31 PM, Malcolm wrote:

...

On Tue 28 May 2013 07:29:11 PM CDT, Greg Freemyer wrote:

...

All,

At my parents house they have a old wireless router (maybe 7 or 8 years old). It normally works fine, but this weekend we had an extra 10 adults at their house and the wireless kept dropping from all the connected devices every minute or two.

Then, this morning after everyone left, the wireless was stable again.

The only thing I can think of is that there may be some kind of device limit on the router and when we exceeded the limit, it would kick off one connection in order to grant the next one and we ended up with a big game of king of the hill.

Does that sound reasonable?

To keep this on topic, one of the devices going on and off line was my opensuse 12.3 laptop.

Greg

Hi DHCP set to only X number of clients? QOS enabled? Overloading the wireless chip will cause it to run hot an maybe go into thermal overload?

I agree the most likely problem is that it is set for only X number of clients.

I've never actually seen a chipset fail due to overload due to thermal. AFter all there is only so much incoming bandwidth, and all those extra phones can't pull much more data than one person downloading.

Many people set their smartphones to drop wifi when it goes to sleep mode (screen off) in the mistaken belief that this saves battery. But it also means that each time they fire it up they connect and disconnect continuously. iPhones were notorious for this. After a while you can get a wifi router so hozed with this that nothing short of a reboot will fix it. Especially if it was configured for only a few devices.

+1 True. Thermal issues on the chipse is another possibility too. Checking settings for the IP range and IP leasing time on the DHCP server looks easier and faster to verify. If modifying the settings doesn't help move to another option (possibility). Regards, -- Ricardo Chung | Panama Member openSUSE Projects -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

I went back to my parents and tested the router. Even with only a couple clients it had periods of stability and rapid disconnects. I replaced it with a belkin n450 db. I can't recommend the belkin n450 db, but i got it working. Fyi: on first admin connect to the belkin I had it upgrade to the latest firmware. That process went bad, and the router went tits up. Fortunately it had a mini-boot loader that let me manually download a firmware binary and load it. I think there were 5 available at belkin for the model i bought and the first 3 I tried did not work. Not exactly a good experience. Greg Hans Witvliet wrote:

From: Ricardo Chung To: opensuse@opensuse.org Subject: Re: [opensuse] Re: Overloaded wireless? Date: Tue, 28 May 2013 21:10:06 -0500

On Tuesday, May 28, 2013 05:41:07 PM John Andersen wrote:

...

On 5/28/2013 5:31 PM, Malcolm wrote:

...

On Tue 28 May 2013 07:29:11 PM CDT, Greg Freemyer wrote:

...

All,

At my parents house they have a old wireless router (maybe 7 or 8 years old). It normally works fine, but this weekend we had an extra 10 adults at their house and the wireless kept dropping from all the connected devices every minute or two.

Then, this morning after everyone left, the wireless was stable again.

The only thing I can think of is that there may be some kind of device limit on the router and when we exceeded the limit, it would kick off one connection in order to grant the next one and we ended up with a big game of king of the hill.

Does that sound reasonable?

To keep this on topic, one of the devices going on and off line was my opensuse 12.3 laptop.

Greg

Hi DHCP set to only X number of clients? QOS enabled? Overloading the wireless chip will cause it to run hot an maybe go into thermal overload?

I agree the most likely problem is that it is set for only X number of clients.

I've never actually seen a chipset fail due to overload due to thermal. AFter all there is only so much incoming bandwidth, and all those extra phones can't pull much more data than one person downloading.

Many people set their smartphones to drop wifi when it goes to sleep mode (screen off) in the mistaken belief that this saves battery. But it also means that each time they fire it up they connect and disconnect continuously. iPhones were notorious for this. After a while you can get a wifi router so hozed with this that nothing short of a reboot will fix it. Especially if it was configured for only a few devices.

+1 True. Thermal issues on the chipse is another possibility too.

-----Original Message-----

There might be another culprit at play... I presume (...) you did secure your connection by means of PSK or so.

As it is an old model, it might have trouble with that many keys. Every once in a while key renegotiation takes place. Or trouble may kick in when user (n+1) tries to login.

To illustrate: i even saw the impact of key-reloading on a server with multiple xeon-cores.

So in general, if you want to avoid such struggles again, it might be advisable to add another (PC acting as an) accesspoint, with same SSID.

(And on another wifi-channel ;-)

-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

-- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 5/28/2013 5:36 PM, Ricardo Chung wrote:

nyway, assuming you can modify the IP range to assign on DHCP server you could make wider by incresing this range to 20 IP addresses.

Why not a hundred or 250? Its not like its going to have to work harder. There is seldom any advantage in reducing the number of available IPs unless you are going to go for full mac filtering or something. -- _____________________________________ ---This space for rent--- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On Tuesday, May 28, 2013 05:59:29 PM John Andersen wrote:

On 5/28/2013 5:36 PM, Ricardo Chung wrote:

...

nyway, assuming you can modify the IP range to assign on DHCP server you could make wider by incresing this range to 20 IP addresses.

Why not a hundred or 250?

It is up to the user. Just a number or amount for testing purposes only. He said iit is a 9 years older router. And make no sense to overload a consumer or houhold router with too many concurrent connections (250 IPs). I would not think it is really needed.

Its not like its going to have to work harder. There is seldom any advantage in reducing the number of available IPs unless you are going to go for full mac filtering or something.

+1 -- Ricardo Chung | Panama Member openSUSE Projects -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org