Wireless LAN usage kills PPP throughput

["Brian W. Antoine" <briana@dogear.com>]

  I'm using OBSD 2.9 from the CD on a Pentium 233 box as the firewall
to my dialup line and the router for my internal network.  The box in
question has a 24/7 PPP dialup, a 10Mbit ethernet link to some of the
other systems and a Webgear/Raylink wireless lan using an ISA adapter.

  I've noticed an odd interaction between the various network links.
When the wireless link is active, in this example I'm playing an MP3
that is located on a system hung off the 10Mbit ethernet port of the
OBSD router, the PPP link basicly shuts down, the throughput drops to
nothing.  The moment I pause the MP3 player, the PPP link comes back
to life.


  (big server with MP3 files)  ----   10 Mbit ---   (OBSD 2.9) --- PPP ---
                                                   /     |
                                                  /      |
  (system browsing the web)  ---- 10 Mbit -------/    wireless
                                                         |
                                                         |
                                                   (laptop WinME)

  I've been trying to find things to monitor on the OBSD system to see
if I can detect some load that might account for this glitch.  'top'
shows the interrupt load going from .5% to 3% when the wireless link
is active, but the overall load on the box still shows it as about
95% idle.  I can watch the PPP link using 'ipfstat -t' and it just
stops cold.

  Has anybody seen similar bottlenecks?  Any thoughts as to things I
could look at or configure to try and figure out what's going on here?

-- 
                                      (UniKyrn on IM, ICQ#27068798)
Brian W. Antoine                    briana @ ipeg|dogear|circuit .com
                                         http://www.nas-kan.org/