Monday, January 24, 2011

Unstable Wifi Connection issues

It's not the first time and not the last time, but way too often Wifi connections are unstable. Of course plugging a good old RJ45 works like a bliss.

This time I'm using a Belkin
F7D1301 v1 Router and all the computers in the household experience a dropped connection every 2 to 4 hours. It can take up to 30 min to be able to reconnect, and it seems bringing the laptop closer to the router helps reconnecting faster!

Interferences?

I upgraded the router's firmware, and great result: no more disconnection, I even download way faster (but there is no evidence this is related).

After a week of enjoying stable connections, the dropped connections are back, every 5 to 10 minutes this time!

Few hours later,
a power outage might have brought me the answer. Indeed the power outage might indicate that before that, the power line was not working properly. Variations in the power the router's gets could create variations in the wifi signal and so the dropped connections. After the outage was over, the wifi connections were stable again.

It is probably a good idea to put your router behind a UPS device (or uninterruptible power supply), this will provide safe and stable current and will give you a stable wifi signal.

After exporting a VM, the bridged network doesn't work

I encountered this problem today.

I exported a VM version 7 from ESX server 4.x to a VmWare Server 2.0.2

The VM's network card is setup as Bridged network, so I should get an IP address from my LAN's DHCP. However, the only IP addresses I can get are 192.168.1.x.

The bridged network obviously doesn't work.

I read that for the bridged network to work, you need VmWare Tools.

VmWare tools is indeed installed and running properly according to the VM and also according to VM Server itself.

I try launching a VmWare tools repair from Vm Server, this one tells me the version installed is more recent than the one we're trying to use.
This is because Vm Server is not updated for few years already, and obviously it does not use the same VmWare tools as an ESX server.

Solution:
- uninstall the existing VmWare tools
- reboot
- install the VmWare tools from the Vm Server
- reboot