Arch Linux

LiquidityC

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2011-09-24

Posts: 16

NetworkManager, wpa_supplicant flips on and off.

The network manager on my freshly installed arch on my laptop has always been a bit flaky, taking a long tim to connect at home etc.

Yesterday when I moved my laptop to a new location and attempted to scan for a network to join using the network manager it acted very weird. One second the manager whould list a few networks but they would all have the label' <unknown>', the next second they would be gone and the wireless listed as unavailable. Then it would suddenly all switch back on again and repeat the same process.

I removed NetworkManager from my daemons and I'm now using netcfg which is fine with me, I don't mind the little terminal hacking needed to get my network up and running.

Anyways, I found this when grepping the logs and I'd assume that's what's causing the behaviour.

/var/log/messages.log:26583:Sep 23 22:16:07 localhost NetworkManager[2853]: <info> wpa_supplicant started
/var/log/messages.log:26584:Sep 23 22:16:07 localhost NetworkManager[2853]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: starting -> ready
/var/log/messages.log:26585:Sep 23 22:16:07 localhost NetworkManager[2853]: <info> (wlan0): device state change: unavailable -> disconnected (reason 'supplicant-available') [20 30 42]
/var/log/messages.log:26586:Sep 23 22:16:07 localhost NetworkManager[2853]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: ready -> inactive
/var/log/messages.log:26587:Sep 23 22:16:08 localhost NetworkManager[2853]: <info> wpa_supplicant stopped

That would loop over and over through the log. My network devices work fine when run manually using wpa_supplicant so I think this might be a bug related to the networkmanager and possibly GNOME3 which is my DE.

My devices are as follows:

Wireless: 02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Centrino Wireless-N 1000
linux 3.0.4-1 kernel
networkmanager 0.9.0-1

My question is, has anyone encountered this before? know a solution? should I report a bug to the NetworkManager/GNOME3 people and where do I do it?

If you need more logs just tell me and I'll get 'em.

As I mentioned I'm fine with netcfg, would just be nice to se a solution or have the bug correctly filed.

Fetzz

Member

Registered: 2014-10-17

Posts: 1

Re: NetworkManager, wpa_supplicant flips on and off.

Hi, I have a very similar problem to yours, probably related. Hope it's not to late to dig it out again.

I have a Centrino Advanced-N 6205 wifi module (Thinkpad X220).

The errors started when I followed these steps to create a software ap:

# iw dev wlan0 interface add wlan0_sta type station  
# iw dev wlan0 interface add wlan0_ap  type __ap  

Suddenly journalctl -f was flooded with:

NetworkManager[298]: <info> (wlp3s0_sta): supplicant interface state: starting -> down
NetworkManager[298]: <error> [1413579407.469263] [supplicant-manager/nm-supplicant-interface.c:856] interface_add_cb(): (wlp3s0_sta): error adding interface: wpa_supplicant couldn't grab this interface.

... hundreds of times for both interfaces

This was followed by another flood of error messages, more similar to yours:

NetworkManager[298]: <info> (wlp3s0_sta): supplicant interface state: starting -> down

You don't have to get rid of NetworkManager, you can just delete these interfaces via

iw dev wlan0_sta del
iw dev wlp3s0_sta del 

(the two different interface names were an accident - from the wiki articles I was not sure how to name the interfaces in iw, and created these two - my fault)

... all good again. In hindsight, the

iw list

command did not exactly specify AP as in the guide I linked above, but Start_Ap and New_Station. I thought that would qualify, and I checked online that the adapter has a soft ap feature, which it does afaik. Guess I learned something. I will try to do it right and add some details to the wiki page tomorrow.

Last edited by Fetzz (2014-10-17 21:26:56)