Wireless connection problems

[djtaylor]

Ok, i've just sniffed one of my MVP's initialising and what you should see in Ethereal is:-

Initial DHCP exchange, my DHCP service is on a linksys router so nothing to do with gbpvr.

Then the MVP does a broadcast (ethernet and IP) on source port 16868 dest 16867 to discover the server.

At this point, the gbpvr machine responds with an ARP broadcast to the MVP to perform IP/MAC address resolution.

Next, the gbpvr box sends UDP packets and looking in the packet payload, contains the reference to dongle.bin (no surprise there).

When this is complete, the MVP reboots, starts a DHCP process again, then the MVP arps to find gbpvr, then sets up a TCP session and that's about it.

If you can't make sense of your capture, if you want to just start an ethereal capture, unplug and reconnect the MVP, give it a while then save the capture file, you can email it to me along with your MVP MAC address and i'll see where it's differerent.

David.

[danguyf]

I tried the following configuration:

Code:

[cable modem]----[WiFi router]---NIC---[HTPC]
                       |
                       +----------[MVP #1]

[AP #2]---[MVP #2]

But nothing changed. AP #2 has an IP. MVP #2 gets an IP. GBPVR gets a BOOTP request from the MVP #2 and responds to it. And yet *nada*.

The only way to simplify further would be to run cat5e.

I'm going to install ethereal now.

[danguyf]

Here is a zip with a 7+ minute ethereal session, my router log, and a breakdown of IP<->MAC. I munged the router IP address a little; other than that the only thing of note is that my wired MVP is set up for a static IP of 192.168.0.195 but I haven't rebooted it since setting that up so its still using 192.168.0.163, as seen in the logs.

Thanks!

[danguyf]

Another thing I tried unsuccessfully: I plug MVP #2 into the wired ethernet and turned it on. It went straight to "Loading Application" in the time it took me to blink, then came up. I turned it off with the remote, removed the ethernet, and plugged it back into the AP without unplugging the power. I turned it back on and it just did "Contacting Servers..." over and over.

[djtaylor]

Well, I don't think it's much help but looking at the network trace what's happening is that it's doing a UDP broadcast to find the gbpvr machine, the GBPVR machine then reponds back with a unicast response with the packet payload reference to dongle.bin. The MVP then never ask for the code and then repeats the UDP broadcast and gets back the response from GBPVR, that just happens over and over.

Just an obvious question, you do have the number of MVP servers set to 2 don't you? Have you tried with just the one MVP wireless and I can't give a great reason but it's also restart the other one for good measure.

Here the two packets that just repeat over and over:-

Request frame
Response frame

So not much further forward only to confirm that GBPVR is getting the request and is responding but the MVP isn't following up on that response.

David.

[danguyf]

Hmm...

Thanks for looking!

[danguyf]

I tried one more thing and this one worked (in the blink of an eye, even): I hooked MVP #2 up to the WiFi router.

Code:

[MVP #1]------[wired router]------[GBPVR]
                |
                +-----[AP #1]
                |
                +-----[NAS]

[AP #2 as repeater]

[MVP #2]-----[WiFi router]-----[cable modem]

Who'da thunk it? I don't know why this worked, but substituting the WiFi router for the wired router with the GBPVR didn't, when both reduce things to one WiFi router and one AP. Ah well; I learned a lot about my equipment this week.

Now to optimize the network!

[SFX Group]

a routing table to direct traffic to each nic individually? And Windows can deal with the outbound traffic correctly?

Hmm, learn something new every day...

I'm not saying its a good idea, it does work IF you really need to do it, and theres no reason as now switches are designed to do this for you. I did it back in 98 or 99 i think to prove a point, worked well at the time, no point to it though.

Many Thanks
Ashley

[djtaylor]

Code:

[MVP #1]------[wired router]------[GBPVR]
                |
                +-----[AP #1]
                |
                +-----[NAS]


[MVP #2]-----[WiFi router]-----[cable modem]

Does the above work, i.e. the same but without the AP2 as a repeater? Problem when repeating is that you cut your wireless bandwidth in half.

David.

[danguyf]

It does. Current experiments seem to support that it works better without the repeater.

Maybe I'll try hooking AP #2 to the WiFi router as an access point and bridging the two APs.