Binary package hint: network-manager
I've been having major issues under jaunty and karmic keeping a wireless connection up for more than a couple minutes at a time. Sometimes it'll go for hours, but then start acting up again.
I'm on a bcm4322 wireless chip with broadcom's wl driver. I frequently lose wireless connectivity, and nm-applet doesn't indicate it. As far as I can tell, this is always on a network with many access points, one or two of which are clearly the closest ones.
I'm attaching a log (nm.log) of a successful connection, followed by what appears to be a successful roaming event, followed by a failed roam event. Throughout this process, even after the disconnection, nm-applet indicates the network is available.
The system itself seems to be aware that it's lost its connection, as the logs indicate. It seems like the network roams from one AP to another, and gets disconnected, reconnects and authenticates, but doesn't run dhcp. Then, if I manually try to reconnect (by re-selecting the network in nm-applet, which already indicates it's connected) it fails to connect. I've been running the following command to "restart" networking:
sudo killall wpa_supplicant dhclient; sudo /etc/init.d/NetworkManager
stop; sudo rmmod wl; sudo modprobe wl; sudo /etc/init.d/NetworkManager
start.
Also attached is nm2.log, which indicates the result of the above, namely another unsuccessful connection. After a 2nd attempt to connect after that sudo command, the network usually connects properly again, for at least a few minutes. This doesn't always occur.
One other thing I've often noticed about nm-applet when symptom occur: often nm-applet will show a wireless access point with the same ESSID as the one I'm trying to connect to, but with no authentication/encrytion-required icon. Such an AP is never visible in the results of "sudo iwlist scanning".
The results here are from ubuntu karmic, with network-manager 0.8~a~git.20090820t182116.cb60390-0ubuntu2, although again, I get the same apparant behavior under jaunty.
I used to have the same problem under intrepid and jaunty, Searching for help in the forums I found a lot of people experience the same issue. It's not exactly a problem with network-manager but with Boadcom's bcm4322 wireless drivers.
Things got a lot better with kernel 2.6.27, at least for some revisions of the wireless card's chipset.
I'm fairly new to launchpad, therefore I ask: Should this be assigned to the network manager package or driver issues should be assigned to something else?