Magic Jack kills wireless network on pfSense. [SOLVED]
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I have a pfSense box with a Netgear wag311 wireless card which I have configured as a wireless access point. Everything has been working flawlessly.
On the wired network I have an old xp machine that I use for video compression and I have a Magic Jack plugged into it. The other day I went to use my Magic Jack to make a call for the first time since setting up pfSense, and as soon as I picked up the phone and got a dial tone my wireless network died. My laptop went into "looking for network" mode. The funny part is that maybe 10-15 seconds after I hung the phone up the wireless network came back up. I picked up the phone again and it went down. I then hung it up and again it came back up. The only firewall rules I have is a rule on the LAN that allows any traffic to anywhere, and a rule on the WLAN to allow any traffic to anywhere.
Anyone have any ideas on this one?
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Do you have a cordless phone connected to it? If so, is it operating on the same general frequency range as your wireless network? (like 2.4 GHz for 802.11b/g or 5.2 GHz or 5.8 GHz for 802.11a, for example) If the answer to both of these questions is yes, your phone may be interfering with your wireless network. If that might be what is happening, try changing the channel for your wireless network or if your phone has some kind of channel settings then you could also try changing that.
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You Sir are a genius. I had pfSense set to channel 1 b/g, and I just switched it over to channel 5 b/g and picked up the cordless phone and turned it on and my laptop didn't disconnect. So I guess the Magic Jack had nothing to do with it, and that would explain why I couldn't find any other posts of anyone having trouble with Magic Jack on pfSense.
Thats a brilliant diagnosis. I wouldn't have thought of that in a million years. :)
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I usually keep my wireless network on channel 11 since most devices don't seem to use that channel (not sure why) or some other random channel that is "technically" meant for other countries (Mexico, Japan, etc), works wonders for me, but yea other wireless devices can really play havoc with wi-fi…effectively your phone was acting like a signal jammer to the wi-fi.