As you've provided very little information it's hard to say. The device could be powering down, i.e. power management features - pinging a host from the machine might be causing it to power up again. Incoming traffic might not.
I suggest:
1) Find out what chipset the device is based on
2) Have a look at dmesg output
3) Read the man page for the wpi(4) driver (known bugs/limitation section is always useful if nothing else).
4) Search the mailing lists/bug reports, etc for any similar problems with this driver and your hardware.
5) If you can find no other examples, consider reporting a bug
|