Much Ado About Everything

I was having a lot of problems lately with my wireless connectivity.  My Toshiba Portege R100 laptop – which is Centrino platform – would lose connection to my D-Link DI-624 Rev. C router quite frequently – several times a day – for no apparent reason.  And it would often have trouble automatically reconnecting, forcing me to use “repair connection”.  And even that was not working well for the last few weeks – I had to use the switch on the side of the laptop to physically disable the network adapter during the repair sequence, otherwise it’d just hang forever.  It would also have trouble reconnecting after waking up from standby.  As I use my laptop a lot, this is understandably quite an inpediment to productivity – and a source of a lot of frustration.  Given that it happens a few times a day, this isn’t just something that you can live with; not if you’re like me.  So I decided last Tuesday to do whatever it takes – short of buying new hardware, which I tend to this in circumstances like this.  Right now I don’t want to buy new stuff, as I’m unemployed.

Now, I tried to update my router firmware a few weeks ago but without success.  I was getting same problems and on top of it, I couldn’t get DHCP to work, and even hard-coding addresses into static DHCP didn’t function properly.  I could only hard code IP addresses on each computer individually, which is the worst solution.

Now, you have to realize that when I get problems with my computer hardware or software, they tend to be not so easy to fix, because I don’t have a typical setup.  In this case, I have two wired computers, a router (doing both wired and wireless routing), another switch and a network storage device.  On the wireless network, I have the laptop, as well as an Airport Expressof which operates in client mode, and is used to stream music via iTunes only.  And I tend to fiddle with settings a lot, in order to try to use hardware to its fullest.  For example, I want all the security that I can get with what I have.  So I enabled WPA, MAC filtering, turned off SSID broadcast, reduced transmitter power, things like that.

I wanted to update my latop drivers (i.e. centrino wireless component) from the beginning, but the latest drivers available from Toshiba are from 2003.  Why was I having trouble only lately?  Probably because as you keep updating windows XP, with service packs and various patches that keep coming weekly, eventually you manage to break something that used to work.  I was considering reimaging the laptop and leaving it in its default state – which is only service pack 1 – but I figured I might as well install whatever drivers I can find, even if not sanctioned by Toshiba.

And indeed, there are a lot of drives on Intel’s website.  So many that it’s hard to find the one you need!  They do provide a tool that will display what adapter is inside your machine when you run it, and open the link to Intel’s website pertaining to that adapter for you.  This is handy.  I downloaded the latest one, installed it, and flashed my router again to the latest official firmware 2.70.
Of course, now I was having trouble getting everthing to work again, starting with DHCP.  I wanted to assign static addresses to each machine, so that they connect via DHCP but always get the same IP address from the router; this makes it possible to set up firewall rules, as without fixed addresses some applications such as Bittorrent will not work well (or at all).  As I knew there will be issues with this, I  browsed the web to find all I could about known issues with DI-624 and wireless.  Luckily I found a good website with discussions about this and similar topics.
In a nutshell, what people say is this:

 
• There are problems with Centrino laptops and many of available official firmwares
• You might be able to downgrade firmware and have the router get along with your Centrino, depending on driver version.
• DHCP doesn’t seem to work if you use WPA and the latest official firmware – or indeed even some of the previous versions.
• You should get the latest beta build, which is 2.71 b something (e.g. build 11), and the latest Centrino drivers, and then you won’t have problems with either laptop disconnects or DHCP with WPA.
• lots of people are having trouble with router going into a rebooting cycle and/or slowing down traffic -or certain kinds of traffic – to a crawl after a few days using the latest beta firmware.

Wow, what a mess!  So, possibly I could’ve stayed at firmware 3.42 – which seems fairly stable as I used it for many months – and just updated the Centrino drivers, and it might’ve just worked.
But devil woudn’t leave me alone once I saw that latest firmwares – including the official 2.70 – support WPA2.  This is the only one that is not easy to crack.  Supposedly even WPA can be cracked, though not as easily as WEP (which is a little more than a nuisance to even a moderately determined cracker).  WPA2 uses DES encryption (though TKIP is an option).  So I naturally wanted to use that, even though it’s fairly new and support for it is still sketchy.

So I got the latest beta build from the above website, updated laptop drivers to the latest – which allow WPA2, set up static DHCP, fiddled with wireless settings, and – I managed to get my core network to work.  All computers were now working fine, though it took a lot of coaxing the router and network adapters to have IPs set up the way I wanted.  WPA2 also worked between laptop and router, and this was good to see!  But there was still one problem left.

And that is, my Apple Airport Express would not connect.  Even though DI-624 has a setting of “WPA2-Auto” which allows it to fall back to WPA if the client is not capable of WPA2, it just didn’t work.  As in the meantime I also changed the WPA password, I needed to reconfigure Airport Express at the very least.  Speaking of passwords, a quick google search revealed a WPA password generator which should be good for this purpose.  I haven’t verified its claims so I can’t stand behind this as a recommendation, but it certainly looks random enough that it can serve as a good key (as long as the key really doesn’t repeat itself, as they claim – a very random key that a few hundred or thousand people are using is not much of a secret).

When Airport Express is in client mode, the only way to reconfigure it is to hard reset it – hold the reset button down for 10 seconds, until the light starts flashing rapidly.  This is because there’s no way to connect to it otherwise, not even using the Ethernet port as far as I know.  This was a good opportunity to also update its firmware, if a newer one was available.  And lo and behold, there was one.  In fact, this one also added support for WPA2!  So all was good, I thought.  I flashed it, reconfigured it – it took a fair bit of time, since it’s never easy and without a hitch – for example you need to also update the (windows) configuration software, otherwise you won’t even see new features!  And even then you need to create an empty profile from scratch, as old profiles won’t show new options either!  What a mess, once again!  And hard resets really get annoying, I had to move Airport Express closer to where I was sitting, as in the end I did it at least twenty times, if not more.

Unfortunately, after a lot of experimenting and a few wasted hours, I had to admit defeat.  Airport express would simply not work in any combination of settings on itself and the DI-624.  WPA2 or WPA, neither did work – DI-624 was not falling back or Airport Express wasn’t compatible.  It would try to authenticate, but it would fail, and would retry forever, every 10 seconds.  I should clarify that DI-624 was always in WPA2 or WPA2-auto mode, never just in WPA mode, which used to work fine for the last half a year or so, before I started all this.  So I searched the web again, and found that other people had similar issues – Airport Express doesn’t seem to cooperate well in WPA2 mode just yet.
Well, I didn’t want to fall back to WPA after so much work on getting the rest of the network functional.  Luckily, I had another option.  Since Airport Express is so close to my router, I could simply connect it via its Ethernet port!  That worked – I disabled wireless and had it connect to the router as if it were an ISP.  It got its own IP address, and whether it acts as simply a switch or does a full blown firewall thing, I don’t know and don’t care – without wireless it can’t route to anything, and all I need of it is to act as iTunes client.  Make sure the option for that is set and you’re good to go!  So in the end, I have WPA2, so far my laptop networking is stable and doesn’t drop very often – and when it does, it comes back soon on its own – and I’m not seeing reboots or slowdowns so far.  I hope this is the end of it.