Re: Weird No route to host

[Glen Reesor <Glen.Reesor@telus.net>]

Thanks for your help.

It is indeed a wireless problem.  I have confirmed that there is no problem when jg-laptop is wired.  Based on my limited knowledge of ARP, this appears to makes sense--ARP is failing on jg-laptop, but the arp cache gets populated when it receives packets from jg-tower.

There are two things that don't seem to fit, though:

• jg-laptop remembers jg-tower's routing information for ~10 minutes, but everything I've found on the net refers to the arp cache timeout being 60 seconds.
• I had no problems with this laptop when it was running Kubuntu 9.04, which was presumably using the same wireless driver, perhaps an earlier version
  

The wireless card in jg-laptop is:
    Atheros Communications Inc. AR5001 Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)
    Subsystem: AMBIT Microsystem Corp. AR5BXB63 802.11bg NIC
    Kernel driver in use: ath5k

So given all this, is there any other trouble-shooting I can do to confirm 100% that it's an arp problem with the ath5k driver?  Assuming it is, which Debian package contains wireless drivers?

- Glen

Michael Stone wrote:

I've seen this before and have attributed it to flakey wireless drivers. The ARP request is failing as (in my experience) there's some kind of problem establishing the connection over wireless in one direction, but replying works fine. I *think* I had problems especially on amd64. You might try using a wired connection to try to isolate the problem.

Mike Stone