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There is WiFi near my house which I use. It's an open WiFi network but it requires login and password once I connect to it by redirecting to login page. Everything is okay because I have them because I pay for it.

The funny thing is that in Ubuntu it doesn't work like in Windows. It does work fast but it "disconnects" me every 30 seconds or every minute by displaying "Unable to connect to the Internet" standard page. To be able to "reconnect" I have to reload a page about 20 times. Only after that it downloads it again and works fine for about 30 seconds.

By "disconnect" and "reconnect" I don't mean that I get disconnected from that WiFi net. It has a connection all the time I use the internet and that's fine. But the browser shows me (any browser in Ubuntu) the page of "Unable to connect to the Internet" and that's how it works.

In Windows I don't have that problem! The owner of WiFi doesn't know why it's happening.

What do I do about that?

UPDATE:

It turned out that it required to wait for 30-60 seconds instead of reloading and after that I was able to download the page again. But the problem has not gone yet.

1 Answer 1

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It sounds like your computer is making a new DHCP request every 30 seconds. It's hard to know for sure of course, but you should check your DHCP lease time using the following command:

$ sudo dhclient -v

And you should get a response like this:

Listening on LPF/wlan2/1c:65:9d:ea:a5:47
Sending on   LPF/wlan2/1c:65:9d:ea:a5:47
Sending on   Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan2 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 3 (xid=0x5fcac5df)
DHCPREQUEST of 192.168.1.208 on wlan2 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 (xid=0x5fcac5df)
DHCPOFFER of 192.168.1.208 from 192.168.1.1
DHCPACK of 192.168.1.208 from 192.168.1.1
RTNETLINK answers: File exists
bound to 192.168.1.208 -- renewal in 19443 seconds.

Check what that last line says about the renewal. If it's not a dhcp problem, then it's got to be a webpage error and your service provider needs to debug the problem further. It's no good if a service is only tested with Windows, they should test it works with other things too.

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  • it says 3280 seconds. May 6, 2013 at 22:20
  • That's 50 minutes, still quite low. But not 30 seconds. Your ubuntu is functioning correctly as far as I can understand from here. Proceed to local technical help as this might get really messy. May 7, 2013 at 11:16
  • But I also don't have this problem when I use any other wifi. Of when I this wifi but in Windows. May 7, 2013 at 11:41
  • Windows might have a subtle break somewhere that the ISP is exploiting and doesn't realise it. It happens when programmers do not test their code on multiple platforms. It's still possible Ubuntu might have some issue too, but there is no way to find out. All information says Ubuntu is working ok and your ISP is broken. May 7, 2013 at 16:46

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