[LUGSB] How to fix wireless reliability problems on campus

[Richard Yao]

Dear Everyone:

For reference purposes, here is a speed test of WolfieNet-Secure after
doing this:

http://www.speedtest.net/result/1482432493.png

I could not connect to WolfieNet-Secure from my current location
before I did that tweak, so you can consider any test done prior to my
tweak to have 0 bandwidth both ways with infinite ping times. For the
record, my wireless card is an Intel Ultimate-N 6300, so your speeds
will likely be somewhat slower with wireless G.

Yours truly,
Richard Yao

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 9:17 AM, Richard Yao <ryao at cs.stonybrook.edu> wrote:
> 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
>