yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Hero, G2 Touch General] superswede:
Well, I'm running the latest firmware for my router but have now done some other configuration changes and it seem somewhat consistent with your findings.

Previously it was running in a "WPA, WPA2 + TKIP" mode but it has now been working flawlessly since I change it to "WPA2 + AES". Hence:

- WPA2

- AES

= :)

- WPA, WPA2

- TKIP

= :(

Info, update on the router: I'm having a WRT54GX, not WRT54G.
[Hero, G2 Touch General] cdmackay:
interesting; I had no choice but to upgrade, as the newest firmware for the v1.0 WRT54G doesn't - I believe - support WPA2.

Since I had many other wireless clients working fine with WPA (not WPA2), but not the Hero, one wonders if there are some WPA bugs on the Hero that get tickled by older routers, or just that the Hero is being less lenient than other clients.

glad yours is better too, anyway :)
[Hero, G2 Touch General] phel21:
I found that wifi performance and stability on the hero improved a lot when I changed my AP from dynamic 802.11 b/g/n operation to 802.11g only. I've seen other boxes with linux having similar issues with this AP (D-Link DIR-655), which points towards a driver issue. Wifi works better on Linux kernel 2.6.30 and later on notebooks so things should improve once HTC produce a build that include a more recent kernel. Wifi was quite a headache on notebooks too with the drivers in kernel 2.6.27.x that is included in the current hero firmware.
[Hero, G2 Touch General] charliepaterson:
I have same problem - frequent line drops whne full strenght signal shows

I also have a Linksys WRT54G - never had any problems before.

tried wep and wpa -no difference.

Also tried some "always On" utility from the market place, it only helped reset it quicker.
[Hero, G2 Touch General] superswede:
As stated above, mine got more stable when fixing router to WPA2+AES but I now realize that I still do experience connectivity issues, although less frequently then before...
[Hero, G2 Touch General] ehe333333:
i don't think this has anyting to do with the router. I got a router from HUAWEI,forgot its brand, but not linksys for sure. I've tried the university wifi as well. they all have the same issue.
[Hero, G2 Touch General] Uqbar:
Mine is working great with a Belkin.

Looks like a problem with the Linksys firmware.

Anyone tried a firmware upgrade on the router?
[Hero, G2 Touch General] cdmackay:
Indeed, if you read up just a few posts, you'll find that question answered :)
[Hero, G2 Touch General] cdmackay:
that said, although things seemed initially to get better, I'm still seeing regular drop-outs with the upgraded router, and now still with the Hero upgraded to the HTC 2.0 ROM.

I do note that it seems to drop most when I'm sitting quite close to a different strong wireless client, e.g. a laptop. Perhaps the Hero just isn't a strong enough signal, and gets swamped?

Anyone else notice a correlation between dropouts, and proximity to other clients?
[Hero, G2 Touch General] nzgul:
i think the driver is not that stable right now. may be we should wait for a while
[Hero, G2 Touch General] nicelad_uk:
Is this the same issue as I'm having? Sometimes I can see a WiFi network and it says it has 2 bars signal strength. I connect and enter the passkey, then it connects. Literally 1 minute later it disconnects and says its out of range.

Remove the passkey and its found again, but then drops after.

Im on Modaco 2.0 and latest radio
[Hero, G2 Touch General] jayjay:
I had huge problems with two separate wlans (with very different access point hardware, one time capsule and another linksys). My hero connected fine, but after a while it just dropped the connection and nothing would get it back. If I went into settings, it just told me the connection had failed. If I tried to reconnect, it said "acquiring IP-address" (or such) and failed after a while. I could connect only by forgetting the network and reconnecting (and entering the passkey again).

After that, I just went into advanced settings for wifi and changed the wifi sleep policy to "never" (from having been set to "when screen turns off"). That fixed it for me. I never loose wifi anymore. I haven't really seen much of a drop in battery life either, so it works out perfectly for me.

Running modaco 2.0.
[Hero, G2 Touch General] BlueHawk:
By default, when your Hero goes into sleep mode, it drops the WiFi (turns off the circuit) to save battery life - however, that means background events like data syncing go through your Edge/3G network - which is a problem when on a limited data plan.

I use WiFi lock as a shortcut to keeping the WiFi on when the phone is asleep. I also use Y5 to ensure that when I am out of range of my known networks, it kills WiFi. So I get the best of both worlds. :) The added benefit is that the WiFi driver never gets into a weird state trying to lock to a WiFi network (with these two utilities).
[Hero, G2 Touch General] schmalki:
I seem to have solved the wifi disconnect issues by changing my router's (a LinkSys WRT54GL running Tomato v1.25) "B/G Mode" setting to "Mixed" instead of "G-Only" (under Basic -> Network settings). I have a Hero running the standard Orange rom. I've not had a single disconnect since this change (before I had to reset the Hero's wifi connection every 5-10mins).

HTH,

Andy
[Hero, G2 Touch General] cdmackay:
The Hero has a standard setting to control this, though, no extra utility is required.

Or am I missing something?
[Hero, G2 Touch General] cdmackay:
That's almost exactly my setup too, so I'll give it a try.

But goodness it makes no sense at all :(
[Hero, G2 Touch General] BlueHawk:
It does have a standard setting to lock the WiFi on, even after sleeping - but it doesn't have a quick shortcut/means of accessing it. WiFi lock allows you to put it as a shortcut to toggle the lock on and off quickly. It's just a convenience method. :)
[Hero, G2 Touch General] cdmackay:
ah gotcha. ta.
[Hero, G2 Touch General] cdmackay:
I don't want to get excited too early, but I've been running in mixed mode for a few hours now, and not seen a single problem. Normally I would have lost the connection several times by now.

So, just perhaps, this is the big fix that I've been waiting for; far too early to say for sure, but let's hope :)

For the record, this is on my Linksys WRT54G v.1, running Tomato 1.25. WPA2/AES.

I also had the problem running the latest (but still old) Linksys firmware.

The Hero is running the MoDaCo 2.2c custom image, based on the latest about-to-be-released HTC 2.73 ROM.

It still makes no sense to me :) I don't have any 802.11b devices, of course: that's why I was running in G mode. Mixed mode causes performance problems for G devices, when B devices are active, which is another reason.

I wonder if it's possible that the Hero drops back to B mode if it thinks its signal is dropping? That's silly though. And none of my many other G clients have ever have a problem.

anyway, thank you very much indeed; I was beginning to despair :)
[Hero, G2 Touch General] schmalki:
That's what I reckon is happening too.

Glad the fix worked for you too. I've not noticed any of my "G" devices performing any worse since marking the change either. Fingers crossed. :p
[Hero, G2 Touch General] cdmackay:
indeed, thanks :)

the reason why I don't buy my own explanation is that it regularly dropped the connection even when the signal was strong (e.g. -50dBm); that's why I said "thinks signal is dropping". All very odd, but if it continues working, I'll be delighted.

Out here in my garage, the signal is down to only -85dBm and still hasn't missed a beat.

I note that the speed has dropped to 11Mbps, which looks suspiciously like 802.11b :)

thanks again, schmalki; looks like we all owe you one.
[Hero, G2 Touch General] jupp99:
schmalki, you are my personal Hero! ;)

I use a Linksys WRT54G, running Tomato 1.25 firmware and WPA2/AES encryption as well, and turning on the WiFi "Mixed-Mode" with B/G Mode together solved the issue.

It is simply amazing, I never thought, anybody else is using the same modified firmware on his Linksys WRT54G in connection with the HTC Hero, but - thank god - you guys got the solution for this annoying bug.

Thank you!!!! I love this community!! :)
[Hero, G2 Touch General] cdmackay:
mine is still working well, so this looks very good :)

one quibble: it drops very quickly down to 11Mbps. That's presumably when it would have dropped out before, on G-only mode. But it then never switches back to anything faster than 11Mbps, even when I stand next to the access point.

This isn't a big deal, since I mostly use the wifi to get onto the internet, and my internet connection is "only" 8Mbps. So it's probably ok. but not ideal...
[Hero, G2 Touch General] cdmackay:
it would be interesting to know whether any of those *without* problems is running G-only., But I don't suppose they'll be reading this :)
[Hero, G2 Touch General] kapen:
I got some of your described problems too, like that the WLAN connection is dropping out after a while and most of the times, i can't reconnect. The problematic router is a Linksys WAG54G (others work fine, though) and what really helped me, was to give the Hero a device name in WLAN. Sounds odd, but perhaps the linksys routers keep track of the connected devices internally at some point with the use of the name that a given device has as WLAN name. That would explain that the user, who changed his firmware, has fixed his problem... and mine is fixed too, by giving the Hero a WLAN name (see my post in this forum for details if interested).

Maybe some of that is useful for anyone..
[Hero, G2 Touch General] cdmackay:
thanks; would you explain what exactly you mean by this, please? where do you make this change?

thanks much...
[Hero, G2 Touch General] Shluggity:
G-only here, via an ageing Draytek Vigor 2600G.
[Hero, G2 Touch General] cdmackay:
interesting, thanks.

the workaround isn't quite as perfect as I'd hoped: although I've seen no drops at all since enabling B+G, I note now that my Hero resolutely connects at 11Mbps, even when I stand next to the AP. Not drops from 54 to 11, connects at 11.

And my music streaming clients are now dropping out mid-song, which has never happened before, and might be related to the expected problems from mixing B and G clients. sigh.

more testing required, wish I could just buy a new router and be done with it, though.
[Hero, G2 Touch General] jupp99:
I totally agree with you, cdmackay - we are all all little bit freaky here in this board.. But that's the only reason, we solve problems like that (on the other hand we probably would never have these problems if we would just use the product as it comes out of the box) ;) :D
[Hero, G2 Touch General] roakes:
I can tell you that I have a Linksys WRT160NL on stock firmware (still waiting for DDWRT or Tomato to develop one) and I'm using mixed b/g/n and have problems with data ceasing to be transferred even though the connection still says its open.

I never had problems on my WRT54G which was running tomato firmware.
[Hero, G2 Touch General] cdmackay:
sigh, it's hard to see a pattern here; of course, we could have a number of unrelated issues...
[Hero, G2 Touch General] kapen:
I'm running the MoDaCo 2.2 (of course rooted) (with busybox built-in) and the necessary steps are (in a terminal are your pc, connected to your phone via usb)

1. adb root
2. adb remount
3. adb shell
3.1 cd /etc
3.2 echo "Hero" >> hostname
3.3 echo "127.0.0.1 Hero localhost.localdomain localhost" > hosts
3.4 echo "127.0.1.1 Hero" >> hosts
3.5 hostname -F /etc/hostname
[Hero, G2 Touch General] cdmackay:
interesting, thanks kapen.

Those changes should have zero effect on packets actually going out to the AP. They merely set the Hero's own notion of host name, and the hosts changes just provide for name <-> IP address lookups, internally on the Hero. Certainly the AP should not notice any difference at all.

So it's interesting that you see different behaviour with the above...

My current niggle is that setting B+G on the AP seems to have locked the Hero into B only. That may just be a feature of my poor wireless reception, of course. I'll need to experiment further.

thanks again.
[Hero, G2 Touch General] BlueHawk:
I've got the wireless working flawlessly with the home network and the work network. Both are running multiple APs for the same essid to allow roaming between the APs. The home network is comprised of 2 B/G/N Linksys WRT310N running DD-WRT. The work network consists of 2 B/G and 1 B/G/N but is a bit flaky (goes in and out of lock) with the D-Link AP (B/G AP) which has TKIP+AES for encryption whereas the other two have TKIP.

I don't know if that helps.
[Hero, G2 Touch General] roakes:
I think the stock Linksys firmware is the root cause of most peoples problems (assuming they have Linksys router). It seems to be if you flash it with DDWRT or Tomato they go away, unfortunately there is no such option yet for the WRT160NL
[Hero, G2 Touch General] cdmackay:
thanks BlueHawk.

roakes: note that I still had lots of problems with Tomato, until I switched from G-only to B+G, and now it's fine. and even the dropping to 11Mbps seems to be cured.
[Hero, G2 Touch General] kapen:
I know, i consider it weird too, that i'm experiencing a better connection with these changes. But as said earlier, i guess the router keeps internally some kind of state connected with the device name (and not the IP or even the MAC, as one would expect and which would be the much better way). That would explain why the strength of the connection is independent of the name, but it doesn't drop out that often.

Just my guess.
[Hero, G2 Touch General] cdmackay:
but I don't believe these changes on the Hero are in any way visible to the router. they're just name/address mapping files, for convenience and prettiness of display.

The router will see only the IP addresses, never the names.
[Hero, G2 Touch General] kapen:
Doubt that. In the config of my router, it shows the connected devices in a summary table, with the name of each device, its MAC and the current IP address.

I thought earlier, that perhaps the router doesnt use the name to interact with the hero, but maybe its a field which the router fills in for every connected device, and that at that point a <null> name may cause problems (null pointers?).

Anyhow, it _must_ have some kind of effect, as this was the only step i've taken and which improved the stability of the WiFi connection significantly. Furthermore, a friend of mine got an older MacBook which doesnt set a Wlan name either, and he's got the same problems with my router as i've had with my Hero before (in fact, just because these two products had the same problems and their only compliance was the missing Wlan name, i thought about this solution).

But of course i am very much speculating here ..
[Hero, G2 Touch General] cdmackay:
interesting; mine does too, but those names are only there because I typed 'em in :)

and all my other clients already have local hostname entries.

I'm fairly confident that the hosts file is used solely for name/address lookups locally.

Also., note that a wireless connection happens before the wlan client has even *got* an IP address. The wireless connection has to be fully up and working for the client to get its IP address via DHCP. So again, name/ipaddr mappings can't have anything to do with wlan setup.

but agreed it's odd :)
[Hero, G2 Touch General] kapen:
Yip i agree with you. But connection setup as such is not the problem (well, at least the first time). I assume, everything works fine in the steps like basic WiFi connection and acquiring an IP. And after that, there must be sth going on, where the router resolves the IP to a localdomain name and uses that somehow.

Note, that i'm speaking of a freshly rebooted router. As the connection is always succesfully setup on the first connection attempt after a reboot of the router, this is not the case when the Hero was connected to the router, and dropped out. Most of the time, i have to wait a long time after it works again or simply reboot the router once again.

Well, i'd like to see the according source code :). Or perhaps, when ill have off the next time for some weeks and i'm really bored, i'll sniff the traffic with my laptop and see if i can find something odd...
[Hero, G2 Touch General] cdmackay:
yup, I understand; my opinion is simply that this can't happen: the route can't do such resolution, as it simply doesn't have the information. Those files are purely local to the Hero.

I'm very interested to understand how your router is able to generate names for its clients. It certainly can't do it by interrogating /etc/hosts files on the client itself :)

Are you sure those names haven't been added manually to your DHCP setup? But presumably you'd know if that was the case :)

I don't doubt we have different problems going on; in any case my problems now seem resolved, and I don't yet have those entries you propose. But your problem may have been different, and something on the Hero itself, and thus your Hero-local changes have an effect on it.

I fear I'm speculating without data though, always dangerous :)

thanks again...
[Hero, G2 Touch General] kapen:
I thought there was a protocol for this reverse lookup (NetBIOS? think that is outdated, isnt it)?

True ;). And not only did i not enter the names manually, i just checked that the router updates the names in the summary when i change them locally (though, after i rebooted the router. Didnt check whether he would update them even while running, but i dont think so)

Next time my friend with the MacBook comes over to visit me, i'm going to try to convince him to finally set a host name for the MacBook and see, if that resolves the problems... or i'll just delete the name of my laptop, mhm :)

That way i can see if i can reproduce both problem and solution.
[Hero, G2 Touch General] cdmackay:
Interesting; I don't know much about NetBIOS, but my Hero doesn't respond to TCP connection reqeusts on any of those ports (137--139). I'm not aware of any NetBIOS support on my router, either.

None of my other clients even have NetBIOS enabled - which is why I didn't think of it - as it's primarily a Windows thing, and no Windows here.

mebbe the Hero broadcasts to the local net, via netbios, giving out its name?

All very odd. My router does not fill in the names of its clients, despite it having a column for that. I entered the names manually, just for reference. I believe this was in the router's WLAN MAC filtering setup. The regular "list of active clients" page has no mention of hostname.

Yet you're clearly reproducing *something* :) I'd be fascinated to get to the bottom of it...
[Hero, G2 Touch General] kapen:
NetBIOS was just a wild guess, though.

I fooled around for a bit and found a function called "gethostnamebyaddr" and several others (including the standard unix command 'host') which can do reverse lookups and converte an IP to a hostname, but thats a bit boring because they seem to work only with a DNS server or their local /etc/hosts files.

That wouldnt explain how the router got to know the hostnames in the first way, anway.

Currently i am connected to a Linksys WRT54GC, which has a column for showing the client names but it just says "undefined" everywhere (much like you explained it).

Btw i forgot to mention that the router shows the names of Linux, Windows and Macs clients without problems, so i suppose it must be some very fundamental protocol or trick being used :).
[Hero, G2 Touch General] cdmackay:
yup, all the unix commands like getent, host etc, all use the gethostby* library calls, which query whatever name service has currently been setup. That might be /etc/hosts file, DNS, LDAP, YP/NIS+, etc, etc. But that all tied to the local system, as you say. No way for a remote system to interrogate the Hero to get this info.

You can also generally tell if a name came from the DNS, as it would generally (not always) be resolved to a fully-qualified domain name (host.domain.org), not just the hostname. So if your router is displaying solely the hostname, it probably didn't come from DNS.

So, which is the router that *does* display the names, and on what setup page?
[Hero, G2 Touch General] kapen:
It is a WAG54G2 (Linksys by Cisco). At Wireless -> Wireless MAC Filter -> Wireless Client List, there is a column for the name which is correctly filled (which is, what we are talking about the whole time). Surprisingly enough, the WRT54GC has the same page, but it just says unknown for the name.

Furthermore the WRT54GC has a colum for the name at Status -> Locale Network -> DHCP Client Table (where everything is "unknown", too), but i dont recall whether the WAG54G2 has such a column, too.

Btw, the Hero worked from the beginning without the slightest problem in the WRT54GC Wlan. My changes didnt affect the connection at all (fortunately..).

So everything drives me to the conclusion that the hostname is somewhat important to the WAG54G2.
[Hero, G2 Touch General] cdmackay:
When connected to the WAG54G2, from where does your IP address come? i.e. where is your DHCP server? Is it the WAG54G2 itself, or another system?

If you look at the DHCP server setup, on the server in question (which could be the WAG54G2), then you might see where the hostnames are coming from, perhaps?

My DHCP server supplies hostname and IP address info to a client, on receipt of ethernet MAC address. Perhaps your DHCP server is also supplying hostname info, and the WAG54G2 is snooping that.
[Hero, G2 Touch General] kapen:
Yes, the WAF54G2 acts as DHCP server.

No, it doesnt supply the hostname, because i cant even setup a manual IP for a MAC. The WRT54GC is capable of doing that, and i have already been annoyed (of the WAF54G2) by the lack of this function because i once wanted to setup a port forwarding to my laptop, but i couldnt because the IP was changing with every new connection and there is no possibility to give my laptop the same IP all the time... cheap router, i know yes :).
[Hero, G2 Touch General] cdmackay:
ah well, the mystery continues :(

thanks.
[Hero, G2 Touch General] djwhyte:
I have similar wifi issues. I have noted these on the AndroidForums, where I see you also visit cdmackay.

I am connecting to wifi easy enough, with good signal, but browsing is terrible.

At this moment in time, I can ping my Hero's IP address from my laptop, but am unable to surf the web at all. If I do a search, using the search button to bring up the search bar, I get suggested search queries quick enough and I can peruse facebook friends photo albums fast enough that I can only speculate that I am using the wifi connection for that.

I have read others that speculate that this is a browser only issue, and I don't want to muddy these waters with the same speculation here, but that is what I am seeing.

Cheers,

Whytey
[Hero, G2 Touch General] brandoo:
Ongoing network issues... maybe?!

Well, I too experience issues with my Hero and home WiFi.

Never really noticed it until upgrading the firmware.

I've got a Thompson ADSL router provided by my ISP.

When I get home, WiFi just seems to screw up. Interesting thing is that my phone seems to interfere with the signal.

When my phone is around, my laptop WiFi stuffs up randomly - turning off WiFi on my phone, everything is back to normal. Not sure if it's the router or interference with other clients though.

I've disabled mixed mode on the router so it's only G now. Will see how things go.
[Hero, G2 Touch General] Tone-Fu:
I've experienced similar problems. I bought a new router (as my old one was on it's last legs) and I've noticed improvement. Obviously if you haven't set your Wi-Fi to stay 'awake' even though the screen sleeps, you'll have to wait for it to 'wake up' when you unlock your screen. Unfortunately though, even when you have set your Wi-Fi to remain awake it seems to take a few seconds to handshake with the router, sometimes I even get the dreaded 'not in range' message in the Wireless info blurb and have to forget it and reconnect.

I'm running 2.3 custom ROM and have experienced this issue with all the ROM's I've tried btw, so I suspect upgrading will have no bearing on the matter.