My laptop connects to the net only SOMETIMES!

[zigga]

Hi guys,
I hope you can help me. I have a Toshiba Satellite C600 laptop which only connects to my fiber router SOMETIMES! I know it sounds crazy, but that's what it does (like right now). I have FreeBSD 13, AFAIK. I get error messages from "ath0" sometimes on the terminal "bb hang detected" or something. Otherwise if I boot, and it shows the correct SSID while booting (which is completely random - sometimes it shows and sometimes it doesn't), I just have to keep rebooting until it does, and then keep typing "dhclient wlan0" over and over (and over) till I get net.
What's going on and how do I fix it? (it's not changing the wifi driver, surely?)

Thanks for the help.

 

[Cath O'Deray]

Reference: ath(4)

Toshiba Satellite C600

What's the Wi-Fi hardware?

pciconf -lv | grep -A 4 ath

Also, let's know the exact version of FreeBSD; and whether packages are from quarterly or latest.

freebsd-version -kru ; uname -aKU

pkg -vv | grep -e url -e enabled -e priority

 

[cracauer@]

Chances are that the wifi in that laptop is on a card that you can exchange for an Intel card. Those work fine for me.

 

[zigga]

vendor = 'Qualcomm Atheros'
device = 'AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express)'
class = network

13.0-RELEASE

I've never done anything with packages except to install a browser.

 

[patmaddox]

You can probably save yourself some time by restarting just the interface: service netif restart wlan0. Not sure why it loses it. Occasionally my laptop (with iwm(4)) card will be disconnected after resuming from suspend, and I have to restart the wireless device. Usually it just comes back though.

 

[Crivens]

Chances are that the wifi in that laptop is on a card that you can exchange for an Intel card. Those work fine for me.

Sadly, that is often the best way. I had to do the same, it is not very expensive. And much cheaper than having a hair transplant after pulling your original out trying to get buggy hardware running.

 

[SirDice]

13.0-RELEASE

That's been EoL for quite some time now.

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[Cath O'Deray]

… service netif restart wlan0 …

Where a restart does not have the required effect, for wlan0, I typically run this:

ls /var/run/resolvconf/interfaces/ ; route delete default ; ifconfig wlan0 down && ifconfig em0 down && sleep 5 ; ls /var/run/resolvconf/interfaces/ ; ifconfig wlan0 up && sleep 15 ; ls /var/run/resolvconf/interfaces/ ; cat /etc/resolv.conf ; ping -c 2 -4 freshports.org

YMMV; what's above includes also taking down em0.

The command can be much shorter, but (for reasons that are off-topic) I prefer the longhand.

 

[zigga]

Sadly, that is often the best way. I had to do the same, it is not very expensive. And much cheaper than having a hair transplant after pulling your original out trying to get buggy hardware running.

If it was buggy, if either the hardware OR the software was faulty, it would not run SOMETIMES, would it???
There's something else going on here.