[Solved] Somehow broke my wireless... so confused right now.

ankillito · 2011-08-17 00:31:58

Edit
As per Gusar's suggestion, I changed my driver from broadcom-wl to b43, and now it works. Theoretically, both should work with my BCM4312 card, but hey. The broadcom-wl driver was always giving me errors, and one day stopped working. Now the b43 driver is working flawlessly.

Howdy. I had my wireless working, but now I can't connect via wireless. I'm not aware of changing anything, but obviously I must have. I would appreciate some help, as I have exhausted google, the wiki, and the forums.

Other laptops on this network are able to connect.

I tried following the 'Manual Setup' steps in the Wireless Setup wiki. Step 2 fails, saying the Interface doesn't support scanning. The wiki suggests this is because I do not have firmware installed.

I have a Broadcom BCM4312 card, which works with the broadcom-wl module, according to the Wireless Setup wiki. `broadcom-wl` is installed, and running (wl is broadcom-wl):

 ~$ lsmod | grep wl 
wl      2609516 0

...so I *do* have the firmware installed.

Here's the script I was using to start my wireless. It used to work fine.

#some stuff to force running as root
#some stuff to set $INTR to the wireless interface
wpa_supplicant -i $INTR -c /home/chamberlain/3437.wpa &
sleep 3
dhcpcd $INTR

This would occasionally lead wpa_supplicant to cause ioctl to spit out some invalid argument complaints, but it would end up connectiong. Now, this script just causes the following error output, with wpa_supplicant never completing and dhcpcd giving up because there is no 'carrier'. The error message is printed out every 6 seconds or so.

ioctl[SIOCGIWSCAN]: Invalid argument

Which I think means it is failing to scan with that interface. Which the wiki was saying means my firmware is not installed. But it is. What should I check into next? Any input is greatly appreciated!

Last edited by ankillito (2011-08-17 02:07:30)

jasonwryan · 2011-08-17 00:47:04

Are you blacklisting other modules?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Br … dcom-wl.29

Gusar · 2011-08-17 00:55:42

That card is supported by the in-kernel b43 driver. Have you tried using that?

ankillito · 2011-08-17 01:00:27

I am not blacklisting other modules because they aren't running. I used lsmod | grep <module_name> for each of those, and none of them show up.

Also, that troubleshooting section is referring to a different issue. I can see my wireless interface.

 ~$ iwconfig eth1
eth1      IEEE 802.11  Nickname:""
          Access Point: Not-Associated   
          Link Quality:5  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
          Rx invalid nwid:0  invalid crypt:0  invalid misc:0

The problem is associating with the router, and I think that problem is due to not being able to scan:

 ~$ iwlist eth1 scan
eth1      Interface doesn't support scanning.

Any other ideas?

EDIT: Just saw your post Gusar. I apparently was looking here to determine the correct dirver, and I didn't think to look at the table for b43. I will try that now. Thanks for pointing it out!

Last edited by ankillito (2011-08-17 01:03:37)

ankillito · 2011-08-17 02:04:32

Thanks Gusar, it's working now! I had a brief snag because I didn't read the wiki close enough to see I had to also install the firmware.

I'm just going to dump some stuff I did in case someone comes across this thread when googling their problem.
After installing the driver and firmware, I had to remove the wl driver and add the b43 driver:

 rmmod wl
modprobe b43

Then, I was able to use my network script to connect to my network. I have not yet managed to get the pre-packaged network managers working. So here's my script, just in case someone finds it useful.

#!/bin/bash

if [ `whoami` != "root" ]; then
  echo "Must be root"
  exit 1
fi

#Get the interface
#send non-wireless interfaces to /dev/null, parse for wlanX
INTR=`iwconfig 2>/dev/null | awk /wlan/'{print $1}' | head -n 1`
echo "Setting up interface $INTR"
wpa_supplicant -i $INTR -c /home/chamberlain/3437.wpa &

sleep 3 #This line is probably no longer needed

dhcpcd $INTR

And the wpa is:

network={
	ssid="NETWORK NAME"
	psk=hexidecimal version of the password, I think
}

Arch Linux

#1 2011-08-17 00:31:58

[Solved] Somehow broke my wireless... so confused right now.

#2 2011-08-17 00:47:04

Re: [Solved] Somehow broke my wireless... so confused right now.

#3 2011-08-17 00:55:42

Re: [Solved] Somehow broke my wireless... so confused right now.

#4 2011-08-17 01:00:27

Re: [Solved] Somehow broke my wireless... so confused right now.

#5 2011-08-17 02:04:32

Re: [Solved] Somehow broke my wireless... so confused right now.

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