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Wireless Networking question

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I ran into an interesting situation at work here today. I went to boot up one of our laptops and it could connect to the wireless network and didn’t show any signs of a problem with the ip address it has been assigned (all the computers here are manually configured). The status showed that it was connected and had a good signal. However I was unable to connect to the internet or the LAN. It was sending packets but not receiving them. I checked all the settings and nothing was wrong. I was called away to work on something else and came back about 30 min. later and it was connecting fine and I could get on the network.

The setup we have here at work is a Sonic Wall firewall>linksys 8 port switch>Belkin WAP. The other laptops were connecting fine and had no problems getting on the network at any time.

I had this happen on another laptop we are using about a month ago, but it was located in the front office and I have a Linksys range expander up there. I reset the range expander and that laptop started working. I chalked it up to the expander, but with the one doing that here today while the other computers could connect has left me a little confused.

Both laptops that I have run into this with are HP dv8000 models. I looked on the firewall GUI and at no time were there any error messages about the ip addresses that were assigned to the computers that gave me this problem.

I’ve only ever had this sort of thing happen with wireless connections. I’ve never had a wired connection do that.

Any ideas what could be going on here? Thanks.

Topic

Becoming a problem

In reply to Wireless Networking question

I’ve encountered the same trouble in a wide cross section of locations and configurations in both laptops and desktops. Some locations were being bombarded with a lot of interference caused by bad air conditioning motor and another was from a laboratory setup that was creating some broad spectrum interference. One I looked at was being interfered with by a bad high voltage section of an older CRT display. Short of carrying a spectrum analyzer around with me, I found most to be just intermittent and location specific. Even regular wiring can interfere if it’s not installed properly and I’ve even got one location that refuses to work and found some terrible aluminum wiring causing a broad harmonic interference. Good luck

Was the laptop running on batteries?

In reply to Becoming a problem

I have noticed my laptop can be flakey using wireless when running off battery power until I go into the settings — its default behavior when running off batteries tries too hard to maximize battery life at the cost of unreliable wireless unless the range is VERY short.

On power

In reply to Was the laptop running on batteries?

No, the laptop was running on power from the adaptor. I’ve not noticed any real difference so far with battery vs power.

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