Suspicious misbehavior of wireless networking in XP
- From: "barton.schaefer@xxxxxxxxx" <barton.schaefer@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 13 Jan 2007 14:35:25 -0800
(My apologies if this has appeared before; I'm posting with Google
Groups and they seem to be having some server troubles that have left
it unclear whether I successfully posted or nor.)
I visited relatives over the holidays and got roped into working on
setting up their home wireless network. They have a USB wifi device
plugged in to one computer (Windows XP Home) upstairs, and a D-Link
access point (DSL router) downstairs plugged into their DSL modem. For
some reason the wireless networking icon in the windows system tray
almost never shows a successful connection, even when there clearly
*is* a connection (web pages load in IE, etc.). Also, this "invisible"
connection drops and is re-established quite a lot, as my son
discovered when attempting to play an on-line game from that computer.
I eventually attributed this to the fact that they've got a Broadcomm
network device utility installed that came with a NIC they had
previously installed. It appeared that this utility was trying to
control both the NIC and the Broadcomm hardware in the USB device, and
this was confusing the windows network utility. However, I was never
really satisfied with that explanation and now I'm even more suspicious
of it. Other oddities: Running the UI utility that was installed along
with the USB wifi drivers would produce a beep and a quick flicker on
the screen as if a dialog opened and then closed again too rapidly to
see, but nothing more. I tried deleting and re-installing those
drivers and the add hardware wizard offered a list of what appeared to
be 8 copies of the exact same driver to choose from (one copy for every
time a previous re-install had been done, I guess; I never did figure
out how to get rid of the extra copies).
Occasionally the systray utility showed a connection but claimed that
it is a point-to-point connection (impossible, there were no other
computers with wireless cards anywhere nearby, these folks live way out
in the country about a mile from anyone) rather than an access point
connection.
A final strangeness is that there is *always* an "Internet Gateway"
psuedo-device in the networking control panel, which always reports
that (a) it's successfully connected but that (b) it can't be deleted
because it's in the process of trying to connect. This appears and
behaves this way even when there is NO real networking at all (USB
wireless unplugged and no cable in the NIC).
In my past experience, re-running the "set up a wireless network"
wizard will delete that gateway device and replace it with the
hub-based one that you specify in the advanced branch, but this didn't
succeed -- the device always came back again. I see on some other
threads here that an Internet Gateway can show up when there's a
connection to a device with UPnP enabled -- that could explain away
that part. Still ...
Now here's the REALLY suspicious part: Since arriving home from the
trip, my Sharp laptop (Windows XP Pro) that I took with me (and with
which I occasionally connected to their wifi hub) is behaving in a very
similar way. Windows tells me that it can't establish a network
connection to my D-Link wifi router here at home, yet I clearly am
connected because the web browser and ssh client are working. This
phantom connection drops frequently. And an "Internet Gateway" did at
one point appear, even though I never ran the network wizard (though in
this case the "Delete" option appeared to be available, unlike the
un-deletable one on my relatives' PC, and it hasn't re-appeared as
persistently).
Antivirus software didn't report anything amiss on either computer. My
home network is set up like this:
DSL modem <-->
wireless router/firewall <-->
wired router/firewall <-->
linux NAT gateway <-->
4-port switch <-->
(other desktops)
When I fire up the laptop and it establishes one of these odd phantom
connections to the wireless router (which I can see is active by
looking in the log screen of the router control panel from the linux
box), the activity light ON THE WIRED ROUTER starts to blink: the
laptop seems to be broadcasting something. Whatever it is isn't
getting through the firewall, because p0f doesn't show anything on the
linux side. I don't recall this happening before, but I never really
looked closely.
Does this sort of behavior sound familiar to anyone? Hints as to
further diagnosis?
.
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