[LUGSB] How to fix wireless reliability problems on campus

[Richard Yao]

Dear Everyone,

If you have problems connecting to Wi-Fi on campus, try the following:

iwconfig wlan0 rts 2347 frag 2346

You will want to change the name from wlan0 to whatever your wireless
card's name is. You might also want to put it in /etc/local or
whatever your distribution's init system stores custom boot commands.
It will not fix wireless deadzones like Javits 111, but it should
enable you to connect to the campus wireless anywhere anyone else can
connect. As an added bonus, your download/upload speeds will be higher
too.

I had been having issues with wireless reliability on campus since I
started using Linux and this semester, the improvements that were made
to campus Wi-Fi made it particularly acute. Configuring these settings
fixed it for me. Now Network Manager behaves comparably to the Windows
Wireless Zero Configuration. It seems that these settings were meant
to deal with this exact situation and that Windows has them enabled by
default. I assume Mac OS X also had them enabled by default given just
how bad things are on campus without them.

Let me know if it works for you. If all goes well, I will post to the
kernel mailing list in a week or two informing them of the situation
so we can get these settings set by default, like on Windows. i.e. You
are all guinea pigs.

Yours truly,
Richard Yao