BCM4306 randomly disconnect every few minutes

[drheim]

Hi guys,

I recently upgraded an old laptop from Mint 13 to Mint 16. Since then, my wireless is no longer stable. It will connect and work, but every few minutes disconnects for a few seconds and then reconnects. Power Management is set to Off. I dual-boot this old computer and it still works fine in Windows with a strong signal. Here is the weird part. I have (2)other different USB wireless nics that I sometimes use in my laptops and they both work in linux, but they also randomly disconnect. Again, it is not a Access Point issue as this laptop use to work fine with Mint13 and still does with Windows and my other laptops all work fine with strong signal strength from the same physical location. The laptop is old with a Broadcom wireless nic that shows up as wlan2, even when the other usb wireless adapters are not plugged in. Anyone have any ideas what would keep all (3) working nics from staying connected? All of this was fine with Mint 13, but I also might have had to fix issues with this Broadcom B43 driver.

Thanks,

Dan

[xenopeek]

Please open terminal and run this command to gather some basic information about your NIC for us:

Code: Select all

inxi -Nxz

Share the output here (see terminal's Edit menu for copying text).

[mnealcpa]

I have had a similar problem with LM 16 and LM 17rc. My wireless randomly disconnects and then reconnects. My wifi information is
Card-1: Intel Wireless 7260 driver: iwlwifi ver: in-tree: bus-ID: 02:

[drheim]

Here it is with only the embedded wireless in there since boot.

inxi -Nxz
Network: Card-1: Broadcom BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller driver: b43-pci-bridge bus-ID: 02:03.0
Card-2: Broadcom BCM4401 100Base-T driver: b44 ver: 2.0 bus-ID: 02:00.0

[mnealcpa]

I suspected this might be a problem with Cinnamon so I installed LM 16 XFCE. No random disconnect problem in XFCE. Is drheim using Cinnamon too? XFCE uses a different network manager than Cinnamon. I am thinking that the network manager used in Cinnamon doesn't like the drivers for certain wifi adapters.

[xenopeek]

All the Linux Mint editions use NetworkManager AFAIK. They will use a different NetwokManager applet to show information in your panel, but that wouldn't cause disconnects.

Topic edited to get OP help for specific chip.

[mnealcpa]

Sorry for the misinformation. Since I don't know what I'm talking about I'll shut up.

[kurotsugi]

the common problem with broadcomm card is that it has several driver for linux. if one driver didn't work you can try with the other one.

[drheim]

How can I unload that driver completely and then load a new one? I will try to find another one, but I am thinking my first step should be to try and disable the wireless nic in the BIOS(if possible) and then see if my usb wireless nic will become stable. I might reinstall with mint 17 and start over because I am 100% it is something with the settings I have applied to 16. I am running MATE, but not sure how all of my wireless nics keep dropping connections. What is really weird is it seems to get more and more frequent until it just stop working. Maybe I am lucky and removing the Broadcom driver will fix the usb external wireless nic.

[kurotsugi]

you can use modprobe command to do that. you can also use modprobe to config the modules.

[xenopeek]

This may be a helpful article: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiD ... er/bcm43xx