I hope this is the right news group for this - it is related to wireless equipment, although not exclusively a wireless problem. Equipment itemised at the bottom. The problem: On the workstation (using 10/100 card) after a variable amount of time (typically 1hr, but sometimes several hours) a little message pops up saying "A network cable is unplugged". This is followed within about 1 sec by "Local area connection now available". This will then continually repeat itself at 5-10 minute intervals until the machine is reset. It is/was mildly annoying when using the workstation but does not really interup work. It is infuriating when working from the laptop though because it causes all connections to the workstation (which is basically used as the network server) to break and the only way to get them working is reset both machines, server first then laptop. The problem has now grown much worse. Not only are the disconnections more frequent but they are starting to cause a temporary freeze on the machine which has affected things like recording video from a DV camcorder etc. On occasions, if the machine is left idle, they eventually cause a complete freeze on the system so it requires a hard reboot. Also, without any error message at all it sometimes just loses all communication with the router and the workstation has to be re-started to get the connection working. Using the laptop linked to the wireless network for surfing / downloading, the problem has never occurred. The connection is rock solid. It seems to affect only the workstation. Recently when the "network cable is unplugged" message appeared I decided to disable the 10/100 NIC and switch on the wireless card. It immediately reported a successful connection and had been allocated the correct IP reserved for the WG311v2 wireless card. However the connection was totally dead (could not ping router). I tried to repair the connection but it said "failed to renew IP address". I disabled the WLAN card and went back to 10/100 card but this could only obtain an IP address of 0.0.0.0 and therefore no network. So I disabled it went back to the WLAN card, IP address fine, but connection dead still. Several resets of the machine failed to resolve the problem. However powering up the laptop resulted in an instantly successful live connection and even though the workstation was at that time "connected" using the proper IP address for its own wireless card the router interface listed only one attached device - the laptop. I therefore do not believe that the router is at fault since blatently the wireless connection was available and working. After a few more resets and re-connection of the cable, disabling of the WLAN card in the workstation and re-enabling of the 10/100 card a successful connection was made. Since then I've never once been able to get a live connection using the WLAN card in the workstation, even though it picks up the correct IP address each time. Since it is about to be moved to a new office and will ONLY have the wireless connection this is a problem I must solve. Sorry this is so long but I don't know where to look for the fault. The router up time on LAN, WAN and WLAN runs into hundreds of hours so there have been no drop outs there and connections with the laptop are trouble free. Is it the workstation? If so, is it one problem or more than one problem? The 3Com 10/100 is an old second hand one. The Netgear WG311v2 has never really worked since I switched to WPA-PSK as the drivers only support WPA through WZC not through their own GUI which therefore has to be turned off. Unfortunately the WZC is crap and does not work well with the card - could it be that the 10/100 is just knackered and the WLAN card is just not negotiating the network security properly due to the problems with WPA - thereby being two seperate problem? Or is it something in Windows affecting all networking? Or the router? Aaargh! Any help appreciated - and desperately needed as it is holding up the movement of equipment and this has further knock on effects. The Equipment: Netgear DG834G adsl modem / router (f/w v1.05) Proprietry PC running WinXP-Pro (SP1) with Netgear WG311v2 WLAN PCI card (f/w v1.017) 3Com 10/100 LAN card (sorry don't know the model no) The setup: WPA-PSK using 58 character key, includes mix of upper and lower case, plus numeric and ascii characters. MAC address filtering enabled. DCHP in use, although pool restricted to a limited no of addresses and each trusted MAC address has reserved IP address. SSID is switched on. Workstation has auto updates turned on and runs NAV2003 and ZAv5 (sorry, don't have the build no). It connects to the router via a cat5 cable connection. Already done: Ordered new Belkin FD5000 10/100 LAN card. Ordered new Netgear WG311T WLAN card (which supports WPA-PSK in native GUI). Tried disabling ZAv5 when connection dropped - no effect.
