[UFO Chicago] weird wireless problem

[Nate Riffe]

I cannot believe Brian Sobolak said this on the ENTARNET:
> Nate Riffe wrote:
> 
> >So like I said, it's some kind of selective packet loss over the
> >wireless, and I am at a total loss as to what might cause that and how
> >to make it go away.  Can anyone help me?
> >
> Two things I found, don't know if this applies in your situation:
> 
> 1) If you have a wireless phone of a certain frequency, it can mess with 
> the wireless.

I do not have any cordless phones, but my neighbors probably do.  If
that were the problem, I would expect it to affect all wireless
traffic, and not traffic to specific IP addresses.

> 2) When I had two machines on a switch connected to a wireless bridge, I 
> had absolutely jackshit work.  I never was able to isolate what went 
> wrong, but surmised having a 10Mbs and 100Mbs on the same segment was 
> causing problems.  It seemed like the bridge (I had a Dlink I think) 
> wanted to be set up solely for a single machine, not service a workgroup.

The Netgear WGE101 can bridge a hubfull.  That was one of the reasons
I picked it.

> Have you tried seeing what the throughput between the two computers 
> connected to the hub is, just to make sure the hub isn't causing the 
> problems before it even bubbles up to the wireless?

The hub on the desk is a known good.  It's been there for ages and
never caused any trouble before.  Also, everything on the desk is
full-duplex 100BaseTX.

> I don't know if you have the equipment to do this, but you might try 
> only one or the other computer at a time too.

Same problem.  Specific parts of the Internet are not accessible from
the desk and it doesn't matter which machine I try.

> Just some ideas..... report back (perhaps with machine names and IPs
> so we can keep it straight?)

The NAT box is spk0-arb0.arb0.movealong.org, publicly reachable as
spk0-arb0.movealong.org.  The two machines on the desk are maverick
and wayne.  My laptop, currently wired into the closet is sausage.

Everything works fine from sausage.  All LAN and some non-LAN traffic
works from maverick and/or wayne.  The non-LAN traffic which works
does so consistently and reliably.  The non-LAN traffic which does not
work fails consistently and reliably.  The failing traffic never
reaches spk0-arb0.

-Nate

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