Kindle probs with MiFi

I've seen this mentioned over on the Amazon Kindle forums... Folks are unable to connect their Kindle ereaders or Fire tablets to certain brands of MiFi units...

Any thoughts on why this might be happening ?

Reply to
ps56k
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Possibly DHCP failure, 802.11Nl, and standby recovery. I don't have a VZW MiFi for testing.

I was at Best Buy last week and found that none of the various Kindles on display would connect to any of their in house Wi-Fi systems. However, they would connect if I power cycled the Kindle. I eventually got the attention of one of the Geek Squad techs, who said that they had to use a static IP address because the DCHP client in the Kindle is problematic.

My neighbors brats received various Kindles for graduation. They wouldn't work with their also new Belkin router (forgot model number), but worked fine with my DD-WRT Buffalo and some older ones that I tried. So, I brought home about 6 routers and tried them with a Kindle Fire. No problems with the older routers. Anything with

802.11N enabled had problems but would eventually connect if I tried multiple times. I tried sniffing the traffic over the air and suspect that the problem is the DHCP client in the Kindles. A static IP address worked by not reliably for some unknown reason.

As I mentioned, I could connect to most of the various wireless routers exactly once with the Kindle Fire. However, when the Kindle went into standby, the only way I could recover the connection was to power down and then back on. I think I can safely say that the problem is in the Kindle Fire, and not the various routers.

I can do some more testing if you're desperate, but I'm on vacation (house arrest) this week and don't want to do anything that looks like useful work.

This is to the Samsung WIS09ABGN LinkStick:

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Problematic is a generous word for it; it's downright terrible. And the DHCP client itself isn't the only issue, it's got some network stack issues (some resolved, some not)

Reply to
DevilsPGD

Groan. The big problem for me is that the various Kindle devices do NOT support WPA2-RADIUS encryption or EAP certificate based authentication. That causes problems in hospitals, skools, large corporations, and some of my schemes.

Incidentally, I sorta blundered across this site: Looks like Kindle development.

I also tried to find Kindle devices in the wi-fi alliance search pages and found only something called the Whitney reader. Nothing else. Maybe there's a problem getting certified?

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

What Buffalo are you running DD-WRT on. I often get asked recommendations for routers and I have a sample of one that works. [Works means no periodic booting.]

I never knew Kindles were picky. They have been around enough that you would think the bugs are out of them. [I'm still getting my books used, though do read technical pdfs on a tablet.]

Reply to
miso

Ummm... Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 Uptime about 20 days. No spontaneous reboots or hangs. I'm not sure if build 14896 is totally stable because the PPTP VPN daemon often dies and has to be restarted from the command line. Yep, it's dead right now. Maybe a later build will have fixed that.

Much as I like this particular router, it's old and getting difficult to find. I also prefer a router with 802.11n capability, which this one lacks.

I don't know much about Kindle, but it looks like whomever built them for Amazon decided to do everything themselves and from scratch. The possible lack of Wi-Fi Alliance certification is an important clue.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

There is some company that will decode PPTP captures for a fee. ;-) It is not suggested to be used for secure coms.

I'm on a Buffalo WZR-HP-G450H. Must be for a year by now. So far so good. The 2wire locked up a few days ago. Red light flashing. But the Buffalo keeps going.

formatting link

At the time I bought mine, the dual band version had all sorts of complaints. That was one of the reasons I got the single band version. That and if it sucked, I would be out less money. ;-)

These magazine do all sorts of tests except the one that matters: uptime. Torture it with bit torrent. On a LAN, they should be able to get a few PC and flog the thing.

Most people only bit torrent over the internet, but there is nothing stopping someone setting up private torrents for testing.

A friend swears if you run multiple PCs on bit torrent, and then make sure each machine can see each other, the torrent gets done faster. Personally, I think this is nuts.

Reply to
miso

Sounds perfectly logical to me, assuming you have Internet bandwidth to spare. What am I missing?

Reply to
Char Jackson

I know. I much prefer IPSEC but the CPU overhead is far to much for the bottom of the line routers that I'm using.

Incidentally, for commodity wireless, I'm using refurbished Linksys EA2700 on eBay for about $40. Quite stable, no surprises, and tolerable feature set.

Nice. I like the antenna farm and the stock DD-WRT firmware.

Dual band has been a problem for me with literally every router I've tried. Sometimes, the problems are just plain stupid. For example, the EA2700 I mentioned will bridge between 2.4 and 5.7Ghz, but the bridging performance is totally dismal, while the performance on either 2.4 or 5.7GHz at the same time, comes to an almost complete stop. As soon as I stop moving data via the bridge, normal performance returns. Looks like someone didn't do much testing.

I use a MAC address spoofer program that keeps generating new connections until the router hangs. Most of what I've tested these days will discard old MAC addresses quite nicely. I've run this test on some of my routers without any problem. However, that doesn't test buffer exhaustion, which is the problem with BitTorrent. Too many simultaneous connections, gobbling too many buffers. I can look inside the box, determine the size of the working RAM, and make a good guess as to how many connections it can handle. I then set my Torrent client to somewhat less, and it never hangs. I don't do much downloading with BitTorrent (mostly uTorrent) and have never hung any of my routers except when I had too many connections going.

If you want to break things: Try the max connections tool at: Extra credit for running it between two wireless connections. I think I burned out a WRT54G running DD-WRT doing that repeatedly because it was saving the MAC-to-IP address table in NVRAM. Oops.

Well, if the internet bandwidth is large (i.e. cable modem), and the machines are old and slow, that seems possible. Otherwise, I don't think so.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Oh, the machines are old and he has plenty of them. [Garage sales.] That might be it. The BBC stuff I download (er allegedly download, neither confirming nor denying here) is generally at the max of my crappy

1.5mbps DSL. Downloading linux via bit torrent always maxes out my DSL.
Reply to
miso

Not much. The machines will detect each other locally and will exchange data amongst themselves, so this technique won't directly hurt you.

It also won't help you if you tune your torrent settings (number of connections, simultaneous uploads/downloads, speed throttles, etc) appropriately. If you don't, then torrenting from multiple machines may help.

The one big real benefit is if you torrent from very slow hard drives, or insist on running too many connections, have too little RAM for cache, have your torrent client flushing to disk constantly, etc, in which case more machines torrenting will split the load across multiple spindles. Torrenting to a faster performing disk will solve the problem much more cheaply.

Reply to
DevilsPGD

Amazon doesn't care, even if you manage to make it through the "Reboot your router" level of customer support (which I did)

If you really need to download books on an unsupported wifi connection, the 3G option isn't that much more expensive and it solves the problem entirely by taking the need for wifi out of the picture.

Reply to
DevilsPGD

Good point. If you have your BitTorrent client set to use (for example) 50% of your available bandwidth, two machines will use ALL of your bandwidth, resulting in double the throughput.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Well yeah, except you set the 50% limit so you had some bandwidth for other stuff. Now you are defeating the reason you set the limit.

As I said in the other post, it does make sense if your hardware is junker grade.

Reply to
miso

Or just set it to use all of your bandwidth, and go Office Space on your other junker computer.

Reply to
DevilsPGD

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