[wplug] Bizarre behavior with a wireless network card.

[Bryce Lynch]

Hello.

I've been experimenting with 802.11 and 802.11b PCMCIA cards for a while
and I keep running into an unusual problem: After a few days time the
cards refuse to connect with my WAP.  I've had two cards so far (a Lucent
silver 802.11 and a D-Link DWL-650) work for at most a week using the
v2.4.18 (and tonight the v2.4.19) kernels' built-in drivers (with the
PCMCIA-CS suite and wireless utilities v24 for support) and then all of a
sudden they refuse to make any sort of connection.  In the kernel message
buffer and system logs I start seeing "Error -110 setting multicast list"
messages, at which time the link light blinks and the card refuses to
transmit anything.  The card appears to initialise properly with iwconfig
and ifconfig (no error messages that I can detect anywhere from either
utility) but I can't get any traffic through the card. If the card is
moved to another system it works fine.  The only symptom that appears is
that the card will spontaneously shut itself down one or two uses before
the card is no longer accessible.

The WAP's internal logs show the NIC (with the correct MAC address)
connecting to the access point successfully (with and without WEP enabled
- the same thing happens either way).

I keep wondering if my laptop's PCMCIA interface isn't going bad, but
other cards work fine (ethernet and modem, in particular). I've got a
300MHz NEC Ready 360T laptop with 128MB of RAM and Slackware Linux v8.0
(running kernel v2.4.19, no extra patches); about the only strange thing
about it is that it has a 20GB hard drive in it right now, which makes me
wonder if it isn't the internal temperature that's doing this.

Has anyone ever heard of this?  Or am I just losing my mind?

--
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