I know this is more of a general discussion community and not for tech support, but I’m at the end of my technical ability here and that is the primary game I play.

I’ve been running the live version of EverQuest for months now. Yesterday, I encountered a really strange issue where if I connect to the game, DNS would completely fail. I’ve tried this over 2 distros: Garuda (Arch based) and Linux Mint. I’ve done a few 50+ gb Steam downloads as tests with no issues. However, as soon as I run the game for more than 10 minutes, DNS just completel drops until a full reboot (on both distros) which is really odd. It’s only affecting the PC, which is what lead me to attempting to load up another distro and test things.

I’ve changed DNS servers around on all but the router (which I unfortunately don’t have ready access to). I know the software firewall rules are good. Is there a way to reliably see if for some reason the router is kicking me off if I use UDP packets (I know that EverQuest uses some)?

During the DNS outage, I an use the same network on mobile without any kind of issue, which is what made me curious if this is a UDP issue since web browsing shouldn’t be spraying those out.

I’d be more than willing to provide any pastes of files etc. Also, if anyone has a way to kind of stress test my wifi hardware to see if that is the issue, it’d be really helpful.

Editing to add: I’ve turned wifi power saving off and will continue to test. Odd that it would be turned on over 2 installs randomly, though (if it was ever off)

Adding again. This may be happening when I swap to the dedicated GPU on the laptop. The odd thing is that it started yesterday. This is why I turned off wifi power saving, and it doesn’t seem to have an effect.

  • @[email protected]English
    6•7 months ago

    Sounds like an issue with your WiFi adapter/driver. You can verify this by creating a mobile hotspot on your phone and connecting your PC to it and see if you get the same issue, if you do then it proves it’s got nothing to do with your router.

    Another thing you can check is your journalctl logs - run journalctl -f before launching the game, then run the game and quit it when you run into the DNS issue, and check the logs at the time the issue occurred. If there’s indeed a hardware/driver issue, the errors should show up in the logs.

    If it’s a driver issue, there may not be much you can do about it besides reporting the bug and implementing some sort of workaround (eg using a VPN). Of course, depending on the error, there may be a fix you can apply, like turning of aspm for your chip. A better option would be to replace the WiFi chip/adapter you’re using and get something that’s better supported under Linux, like something with an Intel or Atheros chip. But check journalctl first and see how it goes from there.

    • jawa21OPEnglish
      4•7 months ago

      Thanks for this. I just tested with a VPN active and had the same issue. It may be the poor overworked adapter. I am going to get a cheap USB adapter and see if it will hold up.With VPN on and losing DNS, it has to be the adapter finally giving up the ghost =/

      • @[email protected]English
        2•7 months ago

        Make sure you get one with a supported chip, though. I have the Edimax 7811un, which requires the rt8192cu driver, which isn’t always provided via package managers.

      • @visor841English
        1•7 months ago

        This is a great list of USB wifi adapter chipset compatibility.

  • jawa21OPEnglish
    1•7 months ago

    Commenting to update: With great sadness, I tried undoing my multimonitor setup and going back to just the laptop display, This worked flawlessly! I don’t know if if the system wasn’t respecting my configs, the hardware somehow healed itself, or what. For now, I’m back in pure laptop mode (which sucks, because 22" vs 15" is a giant downgrade). However, it’s all working…