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pokraka

Member

From: Brussels

Registered: 2009-01-15

Posts: 63

[SOLVED] Trouble connecting with a wireless USB dongle

Hello.

I just bought a D-link DWA-131 USB dongle and I'm trying to use it to access my wireless network. I'm following this wiki page.

When I connect the dongle into my USB port dmesg tells me (among other things) :

MAC Address from efuse = 11:22:33:44:55:66
Loading firmware from "rtlwifi/rtl8712u.bin"

Which I think is fine.

Then I didn't have wireless_tools installed on my box, and couldn't install it because no internet... So what I did is I downloaded wireless_tools-29-6-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz from the mirror using another computer, put the archive on a usb key, and installed the archive from the usb key with a "pacman -U".
I don't know if this way of doing is ok, but pacman didn't give me any error messages and I can now use iwconfig, iwlist, etc.

Now if I do "ip link" I see that wlan0 appears, with the correct MAC that dmesg showed me when I plugged the dongle.

So everything seems ok until I do "iwlist wlan0 scan" which gives me nothing, no error messages, but no wireless networks show up either.

I tried to directly connect to my access point using "iwconfig wlan0 essid $ESSID" which seemed to work, but then dhcpcd wouldn't give me an IP address ("network is unreachable").

Any idea ?

Last edited by pokraka (2012-08-09 03:45:03)

Strike0

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2011-09-05

Posts: 1,429

Re: [SOLVED] Trouble connecting with a wireless USB dongle

What you describe to install it all reads good.
Can your problem be that you have to call

sudo iwlist wlan0 scan

with sudo/root?
if you just call it without, it won't return an error but also not scan.
Post some detail about iwconfig output next time and your wpa_supplicant line, if the problem continues.
I'm using the same wifi-driver. It works well actually - also in N-mode.

pokraka

Member

From: Brussels

Registered: 2009-01-15

Posts: 63

Re: [SOLVED] Trouble connecting with a wireless USB dongle

I tried again with sudo and this time it worked, so yes it was the problem. I didn't know you needed root privileges to scan for access points.

Thanks !