I started a discussion about this when I tried to use Compex WLE600VX in 802.11ac mode here. I abandoned my attempt at 802.11ac and now I’m running at 802.11gn. Main issue I have is that the wifi disconnects all the time. I’ve experienced it across three different laptops I have in the house. I was also having some issues with some other equipment that I finally moved from wireless to wired that’s bridged to Blue network. All of the wired devices operate without issues now.
I tried various HT and VHT capabilities based on a number of different sources. Right now I’m only using HT caps, since i’m in 802.11gn mode.
I have not been able to find any issues in the logs that show why the card disconnects, but I do see it disconnecting and then reconnecting fairly frequently. There is some warning about radar detection as well.
I ended up getting the WLE600VX card since I heard it works out of the box here, but so far it’s been nothing but a nightmare. It replaced an old card that was in that system for at least 7-8 years and ran like a champ. I decided to upgrade to a higher power card since I needed a bit more range and was putting in some new antennas around the house to help with the signal.
Can anyone guide me in what I should be looking into? or do I just have a bad card?
I finally was able to get to the bottom of what’s causing the issue. The solution is still nowhere to be found.
From what I can gather, every time a client disconnects I get this error:
hostapd: wlan0: STA f0:5c:77:dd:d4:b6 IEEE 802.11: disconnected due to excessive missing ACKs
I didn’t see this mentioned on these forums, but it seems to be an issue with OpenWRT. They have a solution, but it’s unclear if it would work on IPFire, or it might if I could know which file to stick it in. Basically they want this:
disassoc_low_ack=0
added to a wifi interface configuration file. Is there an equivalent file in IPFire?
Also this could be a red herring, since there seems to be quite a few people that can’t get it to work even with the change in settings. Could be a driver error of some sort?
Yes, there is traffic. What usually happens is that everything is working fine for a while. Then disconnects start to happen. Usually what fixes it is me restarting hostapd on the router and the offending client computer. Then things go back to normal until the disconnects start up again.
Mind you, this was not an issue at all with my old wifi card on the router. I ran that card for over 5 years and I never recall having a similar issue.
I would probably recommend against disabling this because you will bring down the performance of the entire wireless network and you will sustain a connection that is probably not usable for the client at all.
@ms I’m not sure what I want to do at this point. I went from having no wifi issues with my old card, to random disconnects with a new one, but better range and bandwidth.
What surprising is that settings used by others don’t seem to fix the disconnect issue.