Here is the layout of my home network. Level 1 of home has the main cable network coming in, this is where the network is forked into two different wireless routers one open to the public and one private. Here are the entertainment center or the man cove you can call it with a projector and class A sound system for your gaming and movie experience. Level 2 of house has the family media center and all goodies for the kids – apple tv, roku and ps3 connected to the private wireless network. Level 3 has the homework computer connected via powerline adapter and another laptop connected via wireless.
The operating system was just upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04. The fun part now starts. The home wireless network just collapses. Started troubleshooting the network thinking the internet from the provider has dropped dead. No, that was fine, home digital VOIP phone was up. All wired devices from both the routers were good on the network.
Rebooted the main internet router, the machines, the game consoles, the wireless routers, but no luck. The wireless SSID or manual search for both my networks would not show up. Fun part is this is when I realized there were 29 wireless networks my home was in range with and 16 of them were open. That a lots of packets travelling on the 802 frequency.
Digging deeper started running a packet analyzer at the external perimeter of my network, what I found was interesting, all 802 frequency packets were being discarded by my UBUNTU machine, it had taken over the network packets, inspecting the packets and completely handling the wireless network while jamming it.
Solution : taking the Ubuntu network out of the loop brought all connected machines to life. Lesson learnt, always trace your steps backwards to get to the problem and then the solution.
What a day, I have called it a day now..
