Arch Linux

ephreal

Member

Registered: 2014-03-29

Posts: 35

[SOLVED] unable to connect to any secured networks with MT7601U usb

Hi all,

I've been trying to get a laptop up and running with wifi for about a week now (an acer E 15 series) with little luck. The laptop has a built in wifi card that I've been unable to find any drivers for, so I decided to go with a usb adapter. I searched Amazon specifically to find a linux compatible usb adapter and ordered it.Upon arrival, I plugged it in and proceeded to have no wifi cards show up anywhere. Ip link came up with no wifi cards, lspci found nothing, and lsusb remaind mysteriously blank. So, I reinstalled arch.

After the reinstall, I booted the laptop into the gui (cinnamon, using network Manager) and discovered that I could see networks. I tried to connect to a network and was immediately greeted with a disconnected dialog box. I tried several more times thinking it was a fluke.I decided to try other network connection managers thinking that they may help. I first set up wicd. After a reboot, I opened the curses interface and tried to configure the wireless network settings. Wicd immediately crashed. This appears to be this bug: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/43850 .

I disabled wicd and tried to connect through wpa_supplicant.  Here's the full command that I ran:

 # wpa_supplicant -i wlp0s20u4 -c <(wpa_passphrase "My Network with spaces" "My multi word password") 

Upon running, I was greeted by this with no further output.

Successfull initialized wpa_supplicant 

This morning, I decided to take the laptop with me to try figure out the problem while at an event. While there I connected to the wifi through Network Manager. Since the network had no security, I tried disabling the security on my own network when I got home. Once disabled, I successfully connected to the network. I don't really want to keep an open network up, so if anyone has any ideas on things to try, I'd love to hear them. I'm currently hitting a brick wall with coming up with other things to try, but I'm going to keep looking.

Here's general information about the system. If there's anything in specific I forgot to include or you think might help to see, please let me know.

lspci output for related devices:

++++++
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Wildcat Point-LP USB xHCI Controller (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Wildcat Point-LP USB EHCI Controller (rev 03)

+++++++

02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 15)
03:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros Device 0042 (rev 30)

lsusb output for the device:

Bus 001 Device 002: ID 148f:7601 Ralink Technology, Corp. MT7601U Wireless Adapter

ip link showing that the device is found:

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default 
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
2: enp2s0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state UP mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 2c:60:0c:a9:31:09 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
3: wlp0s20u4: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state DOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether e8:4e:06:2f:53:89 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

thanks for any ideas and help!

Last edited by ephreal (2016-01-31 19:31:00)

ephreal

Member

Registered: 2014-03-29

Posts: 35

Re: [SOLVED] unable to connect to any secured networks with MT7601U usb

A quick update.

Since yesterday, I've found a workaround for the problem. If the network has security on it, I can attempt to join it. This attempt at joining the network creates a profile in network manager, which I can modify to put in the password. After going through that, I'm able to connect by the usual network manager point and click method. I'm not sure this really solves the issue, but I'm going to mark it as complete. If anyone has anything they'd like me to try, feel free to post and I'll try it in a timely fashion.