[Solved] Trouble connecting to wireless network

teepee47 · 2012-01-21 04:21:17

Hello

I'm having difficulty in getting my wireless connection to work. I have recently installed a TP-Link WN951N wireless PCI Card and am trying to get it working.

The device uses ath9k drivers which seem to be working (somewhat at least). wlan0 exists and I can scan with iwlist wlan0 scan. My router is a Billion 7404VGPX. The network is using WPA2 encryption.

I intend to use wicd so I have tested with that. I have also tested connectivity manually using wpa supplicant. Neither seem to work as it times out while validating authentication. I tried removing the encryption and was still unable to connect to my router.

On one occasion I was able to successfully connect to my router (but I have no idea how or why). I decided to then enable WPA2 again. I tried to connect using wpa_supplicant and it connected successfully. I also tried using wicd and this also worked. After a reboot, it all still worked. After one more reboot however, I was back to square one and unable to connect to the router with and without encryption.

If I try to connect without encryption, dhcpcd times out while 'waiting for carrier'.

Not really sure where to go from here. Any advice would be appreciate. If you would like logs, please let me know which ones to provide.

Thanks in advance!

Also note that I have tried connecting using this card in windows on the same machine and it works perfectly.

Last edited by teepee47 (2012-01-21 08:08:04)

teepee47 · 2012-01-21 04:32:23

Just worked something else out:

I think it should say Access Point: Associated after I executed iwconfig wlan0 essid "myessid" but it still says Access Point: Not-Associated. So I monitored /var/log/everything.log while executing that command and noticed the following:
localhost kernel: [...] wlan0: direct probe to [router's mac address] (try 1/3)
localhost kernel: [...] wlan0: direct probe to [router's mac address] (try 2/3)
localhost kernel: [...] wlan0: direct probe to [router's mac address] (try 3/3)
localhost kernel: [...] wlan0: direct probe to [router's mac address] timed out

So I'm not sure what that means yet. Google time.

EDIT: I just tried another router. The router was placed next to my computer (<1m) and set up to use no encryption. The same issue as before occured (including the 'direct probe' timing out as above).

EDIT2: Some more information:
I have two computers that I purchased the same wireless card for. All of the above information corresponds to the 1st computer. I decided to put the second wireless card in the second computer to see how that went. The second computer also runs arch linux. Everything seems to be working perfectly with this second computer without any issues. Perhaps a faulty card? Or perhaps a bad motherboard/wireless card combination?

Last edited by teepee47 (2012-01-21 06:52:45)

Strike0 · 2012-01-21 06:59:50

Have a look with lsmod if any wireless/bluetooth drivers are loaded that may be conflicting.
Then have a try with

ip link set wlan0 down
ip link set wlan0 up
iwlist wlan0 scan

If your accesspoint is listed, then continue as you have tried, but use dhclient (to see if that changes anything). And you are right, iw should show it as associated before you dhcp.
Check if the router has some other obsolete setup (like MAC authentication) and at that time have a look in the router logs as well.

teepee47 · 2012-01-21 07:23:32

Thanks for the response.

Lsmod didn't show any other wireless/bluetooth drivers (as far as I could tell anyway).

My access point was listed when I ran those commands. Signal quality was good so that isn't the issue. I have also double checked that I don't have any MAC address filtering occurring on my router. Router logs show nothing relevant.

I have not yet tried dhclient because in the mean time things seem to be somehow working! I am able to connect successfully to my router. It seems reminiscent of the one time it 'magically' started working earlier on, so I am currently trying to break things again so I can work out what is going on. The only thing I did differently this time was boot into windows, connect to the router, then reboot into linux again. Now things seem to be working in linux. Not sure what that means or how that can happen though...

teepee47 · 2012-01-21 08:07:52

I haven't been able to 'break' it again. While I still don't know exactly what happened, since it seems to be working I'm going to mark this as solved.

Strike0 · 2012-01-21 18:55:23

Ok, good it works. If it happens again have a look at the "rfkill list" output. Booting windows is a work-around we should avoid.

clownfish · 2012-01-24 18:46:29

Hi teepee47,
I'm currently looking for a wireless PCI card and the WN951N is the one, where all my searches ended. In Ubuntu forums is a couple of times mentioned, that the WN951N doesn't work in wireless N mode, just in G. So it only works with a maximum speed of 54 Mbps. It seems to be, that this issue only occours, if network manager is used, but I couldn't clearly find out if this card works faster than 54 Mbps in Linux using other network connection tools.
What about this issue in arch? Which speed and connection quality do you get with your WN951N cards? Would you buy it again?

Thanx in advance, your opinion would help me!

Last edited by clownfish (2012-01-24 18:52:03)

Arch Linux

#1 2012-01-21 04:21:17

[Solved] Trouble connecting to wireless network

#2 2012-01-21 04:32:23

Re: [Solved] Trouble connecting to wireless network

#3 2012-01-21 06:59:50

Re: [Solved] Trouble connecting to wireless network

#4 2012-01-21 07:23:32

Re: [Solved] Trouble connecting to wireless network

#5 2012-01-21 08:07:52

Re: [Solved] Trouble connecting to wireless network

#6 2012-01-21 18:55:23

Re: [Solved] Trouble connecting to wireless network

#7 2012-01-24 18:46:29

Re: [Solved] Trouble connecting to wireless network

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