No idea whether it relates to your problem or not, but I find my wifi signal strength seems to vary a lot for at least some clients.  My TiVo unit (20-25 feet from the Linksys WRT54g) connects using a Netgear WG111 802.11g usb adapter and the Tivo reports signal strength varying widely over time.  When the strength shows low, transfer rates seem to go to hell probably due to errors.  OTOH, my Toshoba laptop with built-in wifi shows slightly varying, but consistently high, signal strength even form the other end of the house which is through two walls. 

Point is the variance in signal strength can also be the receiver and can definitely cause bad slowdowns or lags.

On 10/9/06, Mark Phillips < mark@phillipsmarketing.biz> wrote:
I have ndiswrapper 1.16 installed on an old Pentium laptop running Debian
sarge (2.6.8-2-386). The wireless card is a DLink DWL-G630 using the mrv8ka51
driver. My access point is a Linksys WRT54G.

The pentium box is setup as a remote X-terminal over ssh - i.e. a minimal
installation of Debian and X. It makes a great remote terminal for my kids
for homework. (see Sterminal - a nifty script -
http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/stirling/computergeek/xterminal.html)

Most of the time this setup works just fine. However, occasionally, the
display hangs and doesn't come back for a couple of minutes, or never. The
computer is not dead - I can usually ssh from another computer. However, the
X-terminal session is frozen.

I have also noticed that if I run a ping from this computer over my local
network, I get on average a 1 ms response. But occasionally, the time jumps
to 30 or 50 ms.

How can I go about finding the cause of this in-frequent hanging? I don't know
if it is a ndiswrapper issue, card issue, slow Pentium issue, driver issue,
access point issue, phase of the moon, etc.

I thought about upgrading to the latest ndiswrapper, but it has to be compiled
with gcc >3.4 and my kernel was compiled with gcc3.3. I tried recompiling my
kernel with gcc3.4, but it failed to boot up. Probably a configuration issue,
even though I used the config file that came with my Debian kernel
2.6.8-2-386. Instead of fixing this problem only to find that the screen
hanging is not an ndiswrapper problem, I thought I would go back to the
actual problem I want to solve and see if there is another way to
troubleshoot it.

Thanks!
--
Mark Phillips
Phillips Marketing, Inc
mark@phillipsmarketing.biz
602 524-0376
480 945-9197 fax
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