In previous entries I discussed problems with random wireless disconnects. The problem seems to be that the router was going down briefly, causing the interface to time out, but not reconnect. Therefore, I was stuck with a lingering connection that was technically “up”, but inoperable.

I had disabled NetworkManager because Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex) was still in its RC stages, and NetworkManager was buggy (to put it lightly). Therefore, nothing restarted the interface when it went down - I had to do so manually using /etc/init.d/networking restart. However, I’m happy to say that with NetworkManager, I have not needed to restart the interface:

[101664.145191] wlan0: No ProbeResp from current AP 00:15:e9:76:1a:ee - assume out of range
[101665.013111] wlan0: authenticate with AP 00:15:e9:76:1a:ee


The above is output from dmesg | tail, showing that as soon as the error message is received, the interface begins to reauthenticate. So, for all of you that do not use NetworkManager, consider it once again. It saves me a lot of frustration.

VIM and FTP haven’t really been the greatest couple in my experience. While it does work, it tends to give me disconnected errors after being idle a while rather than handling it itself. Usually, attempting the operation again works just fine. However, there are times where not even that works and I keep receiving the disconnected error (this often happens after the net went down and I restarted the interface).

When I was using Gentoo, and hadn’t installed the ftp command-line application yet, I noticed VIM complained about not having it. So I figured, what if I killed ftp when VIM was complaining about connection problems:

killall ftp

When you do so, VIM may display a message stating that a process was killed. That’s a good thing. Attempt your operation again and everything should work properly. This saves a lot of time - not having to restart VIM (especially if you work with as many splits and tabs as I do; saving the session doesn’t do much justice).

Hope this little trick is of some help.