Connection Dropping Intermittantly

[GalaxyWide]

Hi all, I am having a very odd issue and thought perhaps the community might have some ideas.

I am currently living at school, and of course using their wireless. It's a relatively large school, so they have all the usual network hoops to jump though (eg, several networks, one only for initial registration, some sort of persistent agent, etc..).

The issue is that recently, I've begun to drop my connection to the internet and network completely at random intervals, and it can be solved only by renewing my IP (I actually have a batch file for it, it happens so often), or sometimes by disconnecting and reconnecting (note that I am still usually still connected to the WiFi when this happens, I just have no connection to the network). I plan to contact IT about this, but I'm rather worried about their, er, lack of competence.

Anyone have any ideas what this might be caused by? Could it be on my end, or is this for sure a server-side issue? I can give any scans or data that is needed, I'm just not sure what to give at first.

Also, as a side note, for a while I was blacklisted from using the primary SSID due to a small missunderstanding with the DMCA, however I was still able to get on a secondary SSID, and had full internet access. Unfortunately, that SSID had this problem, only instead of ~10 min - 1 hour to disconnections, it was ~3 min.

Thanks!

Edit: It has now done it 4 times in 2 minutes....very annoying

 

[mammador]

Have any of your co-students got the same issue? Do you have a smartphone/tablet, and do these have issues connecting?

I'm tempted to think it could be a NIC/Layer 2 issue. It could be a network issue, but you need to check if other hosts/nodes are affected first. Seemingly from a Layer 3 angle, your computer is receiving an IP address, so in that sense it is not an issue.

It may be also a Layer 1 issue, but again you need to test the connection on other nodes.

 

[drebo]

Because you don't control any of the infrastructure, the only people who can help you with this is the IT department.

Contact them first.

 

[GalaxyWide]

Have any of your co-students got the same issue? Do you have a smartphone/tablet, and do these have issues connecting?

I'm tempted to think it could be a NIC/Layer 2 issue. It could be a network issue, but you need to check if other hosts/nodes are affected first. Seemingly from a Layer 3 angle, your computer is receiving an IP address, so in that sense it is not an issue.

It may be also a Layer 1 issue, but again you need to test the connection on other nodes

While I am not sure as to other students experiences, I do have a laptop that has the same issues. I also have an Android phone, but it seemed to do alright. I really haven't tried other areas on campus, though I suppose I rather ought to.

Because you don't control any of the infrastructure, the only people who can help you with this is the IT department.

Contact them first.

I have in fact done this, and pretty much got in response: "Well that's odd, can you just use wired? No? We'll start a ticket and get back to you shortly." That was yesterday morning, and I've had no contact since (mind, I do realize that they have better things to do, but I'd at least expect an email..)

Thanks for the suggestions, troubleshooting a network of this scale is not something I'm used to.