Problems with ad hoc wireless network
Harald Hanche-Olsen
base station (this being a short term solution over the holidays), I set
up one mac as a server using System Preferences -> Sharing -> Internet
Sharing, and then connecting to the resulting network from the other
macs. This works fine - part of the time. But once in a while, it Just
Stops Working. The symptoms vary, making this hard to pin down. But the
actual connecting to the wireless network always works. Sometimes the
client doesn't get a network address from the bootp server at the
server, and other times the client gets no response from the name
server. Yet other times, communications just seem to freeze.
After spending hours messing around with tcpdump and wireshark, and
multiple reboots and I don't know what, a pattern emerges: It seems that
packets from the server to the clients don't arrive at the client. On
one occasion, running tcpdump on one client I could see tons of traffic
from the other client to the Internet, but none of the return traffic,
and indeed not a single packet originating from the server. This problem
is intermittent, though once it begins, it seems damn near impossible to
return to a normal situation. Multiple reboots sometimes seem to help,
but even when things start working again, I have no idea why.
Does this kind of problem ring a bell with anybody?
Any thoughts of what I should try next?
Actually, I have one idea myself. I will try letting another machine be
the server and see if that changes anything.
--
* Harald Hanche-Olsen <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition
when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
-- Bertrand Russell
Harald Hanche-Olsen
> Actually, I have one idea myself. I will try letting another machine be
> the server and see if that changes anything.
Hmm. At least for now, that seems to work, with the former server now
being the client (on which I am typing these words). I would like to
know why. It shall be interesting to see if it keeps on working.
Harald Hanche-Olsen
> + Harald Hanche-Olsen <han...@math.ntnu.no>:
>
>> Actually, I have one idea myself. I will try letting another machine be
>> the server and see if that changes anything.
>
> Hmm. At least for now, that seems to work, with the former server now
> being the client (on which I am typing these words). I would like to
> know why. It shall be interesting to see if it keeps on working.
Update: Nope, it didn't. I have now given up on this. We'll just take
turns using the DSL. But I'd still like to figure it out for the future.