Hi all,

Firstly, I have seen this problem in other threads, if you have this problem feel free to skip the preamble here and test out the workaround below.

I've had my Nokia a few weeks now, but since I was moving house this is the first oppertunity I've had to test the wlan functionality.

I have the problem where under normal circumstances the wlan connection to my home router is dropping in a few seconds, to a few minutes. The longest I have seen a connection last is 2 or 3 minutes. The AP is configured to run in g mode with a WPA PSK.

Now I don't believe this is due to a poor antenna in the machine because I don't have a problem connecting, or using it, at a distance from the AP. The problem is that at some point shortly after data has been transfered the connection drops.

I've read threads on this site and other sites where other people have the same problem as I was having, but I haven't seen any fixes there. This is really a deal-breaker for me as I bought the 770 for on-call service, and decent SSH connections are essential to me so I can fix servers from the, erm, comfort of my bed at 3:30am

Workaround

I don't have a fix for this but I have a workaround that works for me at least, it woud be good if others can try it, and maybe we can come up with a better solution.

It seems there are a few networking problems for the 770, but if your 770 works fine on a b network without WPA/WEP, and it doesn't work on a g network with WPA then I believe there is a good chance this will work for you.

Please note you will have needed to install xterm for this.

On my home network I have my laptop running constantly and I had the idea to ping the 770 to keep the connection open. After I connect the 770 to the network I get the ip-address associated with wlan0 by running /sbin/ifconfig on a xterm, then from my laptop I ping that ip-address constantly every second.

So far this has stopped the disconnection problems for me, YMMV.

Discussion

Given that it works, this is not really what I would call a "robust" solution! For one thing you need a second PC on the network. This can be avoided if there was a ping command available on the 770, but i have not been able to find one. I'm sure there is a package with ping in it out there (can someone give me a pointer) or else it should be easy to build one. When we have this it shoud be simple to have the 770 ping an external address (google.com for example) instead of needing a second machine to ping the 770.

It seems the real problem is (and this is of course an educated guess rather than fact) that at some point the 770 mistakenly detects that the network has lost the connection and resets the ip settings for the wlan connection. It seems to me that this may be caused by some scheduling problem since it only occurs when there is no data being sent (and hence the thread is probably inactive). It also seems to happen in the vast majority of cases to people using g networks and WPA keys. Judging by the posts, I suspect the WPA is more of a problem than the g network.

The obvious solution would be to stop the reseting of the ip settings unless we are really getting failures in sending data, not sure how easy this woud be to do or even if the source is open to do this. The second solution would be fixing the software that detects the broken wlan connection, again I haven't looked into this yet. I don't want to do the work until I am sure no one else has fixed the problem.

Cheers, havok.

Is to try running with the Internet radio on, I've been trying this for a quarter of an hour and it seems to be working as well. When I turned this off I had a disconnect within a few minutes.

silly question really... but did you check your settings (under control panel connectivity settings)? One of the options is idle times. I have found that if I haven't used my connection for a little bit of time it likes to drop it. I also found it likes to drop the connection in standby (with the cover on). The other way it likes to drop the connection is if an application made the connection (opened the connection manager). Example, have no connection and then use the web browser, but don't connect first. Close the application, connection ends.

I've ran irc on quiet channels for long periods of time with no problem.

I had the settings for the wlan set to never disconnect. The first time I noticed it was during normal browsing, and later whilst I was chatting on IRC. I noticed that is I was chatting continuously it didn't disconnect, which gave me the idea to use ping.

have you tried different channels? I had an issue with a box here getting disconnected from the WLan a lot. Switched to a different channel, and I haven't had much of an issue. There are several other access points in the area, and I suspect that some of them used the same channel I had randomly picked in the beginning.

If the problem persists on different channels then the chances are you're getting interference on the standard one.

yes - as bizarre as this may seem - that actually seems to work
maybe the constant feed of data for the radio stream is helping to hold a data flow even though it uses some of the transfer rates

I have the very same issue and solution, I did however find a ping-packet though I'm not sure if it's part of the original distribution. The tablet I have is used by the group I'm with at my university so it is quite possible that someone else installed ping.
For me the binary is located at /var/lib/install/usr/bin/ping

I would love to know if any of you guys have found a better (real) solution.

Just for the record. I experience the same problems nowadays after installing the new firmware. With the old one I didn't have any problems with WPA-PSK on 11G (on Linksys WAG354).
It just tells me every now and then "connection lost" when I try to browse from the page I was reading. Haven't tried the InternetRadio or ping workaround but it sounds like a proper(temporary) sollution to me.

i never had any problem with my g. then again im not using any security. dont know if that plays a factor. once in a while i would get disconnected and then i would have to choose my connection again but then i used the check box to mark "use this connection without asking" and from then on it made less tedious than to keep choosing my connection when it got disconnected.

Just FYI, I did a more permanent workaround using the ideas and info from this guy:
http://stefans.datenbruch.de/nokia770/
I hooked in this small shell-script just after it has received an IP but before it's signaled on the dbus. It exits on ping return-code 2 (ping error, not time-out) which I'm hoping will only happen when the user deliberately disconnects.