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.