[Cialug] Question about Ubuntu

[Stuart Thiessen]

I have installed Ubuntu on a commodity PC to use as a fileserver in  
our office. Then I have also helped a friend at work install it on an  
older PC in his home.

One experience both PC's are having is that the network connections  
are not very stable. He uses wireless for his PC and he finds that it  
frequently cannot find the network. He is not used to Linux so he  
tends to restart the computer to "get the wireless to work again."  
Needless to say, he is frustrated more with Ubuntu than Windows. He  
noticed the same kind of network unstability with the Ubuntu computer  
that is our file server. He noticed that we didn't have a problem with  
the fileserver when it was running SUSE 9.x, but after I upgraded it  
to Ubuntu, it was not as reliable. Note: The fileserver is wired, not  
wireless, so that may be a different problem from what he experiences  
at home, but he thinks of it as the same problem.

I know that this is a fuzzy way to describe it. My job has changed now  
to where I don't get into the technical details as much anymore and so  
I am not as up on things as I would like.

My questions:

1) What is the best place(s) to start to troubleshoot this kind of  
problem (both at his home and at the office)?

2) For the office, would it be better to install something else that  
would be more focused on fileserving to one Windows PC and 3 Macs? If  
so, what do you suggest? I have all the data on a separate hard drive  
so it is no problem to install something different if that is a better  
solution.

3) For his home PC, have you experienced this before? He didn't have  
this problem with Windows, but he did with Ubuntu. I can gather  
specifics if I know what will help to troubleshoot.

Thanks,

Stuart Thiessen