[ale] Ongoing Ubuntu network suckage

[JK]

Hi folks,

I have an Ubuntu 8.10 desktop machine that I'm actually using as a
server. I got rid of Network Manager because it completely refused
to Do What I Told It -- it would always reset every network interface
back to "DHCP" upon reboot, even if I'd explicitly configured static
IPs. So I am now configuring all my network interfaces (2 wired
Ethernet ports and two Belkin wireless USB transceivers) in
/etc/rc.local, and that mostly works fine.

I have one remaining problem:
Occasionally one or the other of the wifi interfaces will quit
working.  The mode of failure is mysterious.  The interface is
still associated with its access point (so says iwconfig), and
configured with the appropriate IP; further, the interface's
wpa_supplicant instance does not show anything unusual in its output.
However, traffic cannot exit on the affected interface; any attempt
to do so results in either nothing at all, or else
ICMP-host-unreachable messages from the local wifi interface.
Re-starting the appropriate wpa_supplicant seems to fix the problem.

The wifi cards are Belkin "BasicHomeConnectivity" 802.11b/g USB
cards ($29 at Target).  Ubuntu detects the hardware just fine,
wpa_supplicant associates without any problem... But then after
a couple hours, things just... stop.

For the moment I've hacked around this with a once/minute cron
job that tries to ping both wifi access points, and restarts
wpa_supplicant if the pings fail. But that kinda sucks.

Thanks in advance for any advice,

-- JK

-- 
A closed mouth gathers no feet.