Slow wireless

[Greg Stark]

Jouni Malinen <jkmaline at cc.hut.fi> writes:

> On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 03:27:52PM -0400, Greg Stark wrote:
> 
> > The hostap box is actually a pretty slow cpu so 300kbytes/s may actually be
> > about as fast as it can go. That's about as fast as I see on my upstream
> > connections. But there's really no reason I can imagine to be seeing the
> > abysmal numbers in the area of 100kbytes/s.
> 
> How slow a CPU are we talking about? I've seen ca. 6 Mbps connections
> without problems on 166 MHz PowerPC..

Uhm. It's slower.

It's an AMD 486DX4 120mhz.

Actually it just occurred to me to wonder if it's possible the PCI card or the
hostap driver is sensitive to the PCI bus speed. I think a DX4 120Mhz would be
running the PCI bus at 30Mhz. Is it possible the PCI card is doing something
wrong because it's being run at a 10% slower clock speed than it's expecting?

> > In the logs I see the rate jumping around between 1MB/s, 2MB/s, 5.5MB/s, and
> > 11MB/s. And the noise floor seems awfully high on the client end. But I don't
> > know where to go from here debugging this.
> 
> What kind of equipment do you have available for debugging this? Any
> chance of having a wireless sniffer to capture the frames sent between
> the AP and client?

How would I go about doing that? Just a laptop running airsnort? I could turn
up something like that. But how would be any better than the laptop that I'm
currently using?

-- 
greg