Wifi constantly dropping for authentication

[Firry]

Just had a new ISP and their modem and wifi router installed in the house, and my wifi connection is constantly dropping. The ISP's tech support aren't able to think outside their Windows, so I'm hoping someone here has an idea what setting I need to tweak.

When the wifi goes down a pop-up window says "authentication required by wi-fi network." The wifi is up, but something somewhere is not recognizing that the password has been entered. The very same pop-up window auto-populates the password though, and all it requires that I do is click the "connect" button. Very strange.

Possibly interesting: I've noticed for a long time that Mint reports the signal strength from ANY wifi source as constantly rising and falling. Signal strength is 100% then 60% then 30% then 100% again. I can sit there and watch this vary up and down while the computer appears to be sitting idle. No idea what causes this, and wonder if some setting is causing my reception of the signal to occasionally dip to 0%.

The modem / wifi router unit is an Actiontec C1000A, a 802.11n unit. I'm running Mint 16 64-bit on a Lotus Eclipse 650 notebook. Update Manager says I'm up to date.

Here are inxi, ifconfig, iwconfig, and sudo /usr/lib/linuxmint/mintWifi/mintWifi.py :

[img]file:///home/bodhisattva/Desktop/inxi%20from%202014-10-18%2007:27:08.png[/img]

[img]file:///home/bodhisattva/Desktop/ifconfig%20from%202014-10-18%2007:17:25.png[/img]

[img]file:///home/bodhisattva/Desktop/iwconfig%20from%202014-10-18%2007:18:30.png[/img]

[img]file:///home/bodhisattva/Desktop/mintWifi.py%20from%202014-10-18%2007:40:06.png[/img]

Thanks in advance for any thoughts and suggestions!

[Firry]

iwconfig.png

inxi.png

ifconfig.png

Sorry, here are the proper image files...

[Firry]

mintWifi.py.png

...and the sudo /usr/lib/linuxmint/mintWifi/mintWifi.py

Thanks again.

[acerimusdux]

Not really seeing anything, but stab in the dark, try going to edit connections, maybe delete and recreate your connection. Make sure infrastructure mode is checked, maybe try checking "require IPV4 addressing" on the IPV4 panel.

What do you get for:

Code: Select all

inxi -i

[JeremyB]

I want you to install pastebin and run the wireless script

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install pastebinit

Code: Select all

wget -N -t 5 -T 10 http://dl.dropbox.com/u/57264241/wireless_script && chmod +x wireless_script && ./wireless_script

The script will ask if you want to upload to pastebin, choose y and the script with post a URL in the terminal window, just use the mouse to copy the link and paste it in a post

You don't have to take screenshots to post data from terminal you can use your mouse to scroll the window, left click and drag to highlight text and you can right click to select copy. This method also works to copy commands from websites to paste them into terminal so there are less chance of typos. And with pastebin installed you can route any text returned from a terminal command to pastebin using the pipe symbol | which is used by using SHIFT + \

If you wanted to search dmesg log for wlan0 and upload it to pastebin, the command would be

Code: Select all

dmesg | grep wlan0 | pastebinit

One that might make more sense is the inxi -i you were asked for

Code: Select all

inxi -i | pastebinit

Almost forgot, when pasting info copied from terminal please use the Code tags, which is [ Code ] before the pasted info(without spaces between brackets and code) and [ /code] after

And try to upgrade to LM 17 as LM16 is no longer supported which means no updates

[Firry]

Hello acerimusdux. For inxi -i I get the following:

[Network: Card-1: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller driver: r8169
IF: eth0 state: down mac: 00:90:f5:f9:ea:1f
Card-2: Realtek RTL8723AE PCIe Wireless Network Adapter driver: rtl8723ae
IF: wlan0 state: up mac: 2c:d0:5a:7b:1a:0c
WAN IP: 184.100.231.116 IF: eth0 ip: N/A IF: wlan0 ip: 192.168.0.3]

Hello JeremyB. Thanks, will get pastebin; stand by...

[Firry]

JeremyB,
Pastebin done as suggested.
This may sound crazy, but will the upgrade to Mint17 wipe the hard drive? I'm two days away from my back up external drive.
Thanks.

[JeremyB]

JeremyB,
Pastebin done as suggested.
This may sound crazy, but will the upgrade to Mint17 wipe the hard drive? I'm two days away from my back up external drive.
Thanks.

It can wait a few days

Do you have the URL that you got from the wireless script?

[Firry]

URL is http://pastebin.com/DuajLzuH

Thanks

[JeremyB]

Actually, you could try what I posted here http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 85#p937262
if you have a wired connection while using Mint 16, it might work but I have my doubts because I suspect most of the LM16 and Ubuntu 13.10 software repositories are shut down

Edit to add: Have you rebooted lately, since running command sudo iw reg set US? The script dmesg portion shows the disconnects just after the wifi drops TX power because of info from the router

[Firry]

Thanks Jeremy. Did the first two steps listed there, but the third step [ cd ~/Desktop/backports-3.16-1 ] resulted in "no such file or directory."

[JeremyB]

Thanks Jeremy. Did the first two steps listed there, but the third step [ cd ~/Desktop/backports-3.16-1 ] resulted in "no such file or directory."

Have you rebooted lately, since running command sudo iw reg set US? The script dmesg portion shows the disconnects just after the wifi drops TX power because of info from the router

You have to download the file in the URL above the code commands, this one- download this to your desktop https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel ... 6-1.tar.xz right click on the file and use 'extract here' - and then you can run the rest of the commands