Intermittent wireless connection

[Beaker01]

Hi All

I'm having difficulty connecting to my wireless network at seemingly random times. I'm running ndiswrapper with the bcmw15 driver and if everything boots up without error initially, there are no problems. However, sometimes during bootup, I get the following messages:

Setting network parameters [ OK ]
Bringing up loopback interface [ OK ]
Bringing up interface wlan0 [ OK ]
Starting the Firestarter firewall [FAILED]
[FAILED]
When this happens, I can't get at the network. Using ifup results in the following:

[andy@beaker andy]$ /sbin/ifup wlan0
Determining IP information for wlan0... External network device wlan0 is not ready. Aborting..
SIOCSIFNETMASK: Cannot assign requested address
SIOCSIFBRDADDR: Cannot assign requested address
SIOCADDRT: Network is unreachable
External network device wlan0 is not ready. Aborting..done.
Checking the network status using /sbin/service tells me that wlan0 is configured and active and restarting it gives me OK messages for everything, but it still can't be accessed. The only way I've found to get the network connection back is to reboot, and hope for the best.

Any suggestions as to how I can avoid having to reboot? I'm using FC2 2.6.5-1.358 and a BT Voyager 2100 DSL wireless modem/router, if that helps.

Cheers!

[Miadlo]

are you using any type of securtiy like WEP on your wireless? if you are you might want to try changing that from hex to ascii or just turn off the WEP completely and see if that helps you any.

[Beaker01]

Thanks for the response, Miadlo.

I'm using WEP with a hex key - I don't *think* that's the problem as it wouldn't explain why I can sometimes get a connection and sometimes not. Anyway, I'll give it a go and see what happens.

[Beaker01]

For what it's worth, I think I've sorted this out.

It seems like my wireless modem/router drops into "Training" mode occasionally before getting its connection sorted out again. If I happen to be booting whilst it's training, Linux can't find the network which causes the problem as originally described. However, once booted using /sbin/service network reload seems to find the network, if it's available (but /sbin/service network restart doesn't - anyone care to enlighten me as to what the difference is?).

Hope this is of some use to anyone with a simlar problem.