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We have a latpop that when it is connected to the wireless network, all other laptops of the network start to have intermittent connection.

Why could be this happening?

The computer is not getting IP Address when is connected to the wireless network.

Ricardo Polo Jaramillo
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  • You have to troubleshoot. When the laptops get an intermittent connection, can they ping the router? Does their ARP table change? And so on. – David Schwartz Aug 29 '12 at 00:28

3 Answers3

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I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark (since you give us nothing else) and say that the laptop has a static IP configured on the wireless adapter that is the same as the default gateway on the wireless network.

MDMarra
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  • +1 Oh yes... That's a nasty one. I remember a situation where we split a /24 to 2x /25. The developer who originally had a DHCP reservation on .129 had reconfigured his system for static as that would give him quicker boots. Of course he hadn't bothered reading the emails telling everybody to switch back from static to DHCP. Worst thing was that he was on holiday during the split. Problems started when he got back. We didn't immediately associate the LAN outage with the subnet changes we made 10 days earlier. First thought was router problems. – Tonny Aug 28 '12 at 22:02
  • This is interesting but this is not the case. In this case the wireless interface is configure for dynamic addressing and is getting APIPA. – Ricardo Polo Jaramillo Aug 28 '12 at 23:11
2

Take your pick:

  • Malware on the laptop.
  • Some sort of high-bandwidth using software (e.g. media streaming, usenet client, multi-threaded ftp client) which monopolizes the Wifi LAN. (Remember Wifi is a shared medium. One bandwidth hog is all it takes. )
  • Faulty Wifi adapter.
  • Faulty drivers on the Wifi adaptor.
  • All of the above

My best guess: Malware is the most likely cause.

To determine if it is software or hardware related: Boot from a Linux Live-CD and see if it still has the same issue. If it does it is certainly the Wifi hardware. If not it has to be software related.

Edit: After seeing the laptop goes APIPA it almost has to be hardware or driver related. Software can't come into play as the laptop doesn't get really online. Still recommend testing with a Linux Live-CD.

Tonny
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0

Not a whole lot of information to go on here...

In the past when we had a similar problem it had to do with the offending laptop actually have malicious software running that was overwhelming the access point in terms of processing power. Essentially it was trying to send as many SPAM messages as possible and this caused connection problems because the device could simply not handle the load.

Might be worth looking into.

Brent Pabst
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