Arch Linux

Granheim

Member

Registered: 2021-05-25

Posts: 4

Erratic behaviour when attempting to connect to WPA Enterprise network

Almost a month ago I made a post in which I outlined my difficulty with connecting to eduroam (and eduroam only --- ordinary home networks present no problem) via iwd. As I tried more and more, it became clear that my configurations were fine, and I started to suspect that there's a bug in iwd. But as time went on, I noticed that the problem is of a more erratic nature, indicating that the problems are more 'external' --- but I am at a loss to explain them.

• My computer is dual-booted with Windows 10 (which I rarely use now that I have Arch). One day I started up Windows 10 again, and I was surprised to find out that eduroam wasn't working there either, despite having consistently worked before dual booting. (Just as on Arch, ordinary networks still worked fine.) The error messages were unenlightening, and the usual troubleshooting techniques proved in vain.  Every once in a while, however, it would connect, only to fail again when rebooting. As of today, my only method of getting to connect to eduroam on Windows is by performing the following operations in random order until --- seemingly at random --- the connection works.

  1. Delete the remembered networks.

  2. Run eduroam's configuration tool.

  3. Reboot the computer

• Back on Arch, I at some point gave up on iwd and tried to see if I could get the internet working with wpa_supplicant instead. For a while, this proved unsuccessful. There was some error messages in the journal logs indicating an EAP authentication failure, but there was no signs of any config files actually being wrong.

For a while, this was the status quo, but today the pattern got disrupted: I updated Windows 10 today, and then proceed to reboot back to Arch; lo and behold, my connection with eduroam via wpa_supplicant was working, for the first time ever.

Being curious if the Windows update had something to do with this, I switched to iwd to see if that worked as well, and found that it didn't. I then switched back to wpa_supplicant, and now my internet was again gone. Seemingly unable to reproduce that brief moment of connection, I rebooted --- no internet. I then attempted to boot Windows and then back to Arch --- still no internet. But upon rebooting *another* time, the internet was back. I am now in the understanding that the connection appears to succeed 'at random' upon alternatingly booting to Windows and to Arch.

I'd be happy to provide error logs, but at this point I am no longer sure which logs are relevant and which ones aren't. My previous post provided error logs of iwd. Below I'll paste the journalctl logs of wpa_supplicant. Here is what they look like when the internet fails after rebooting.

Jun 22 11:28:11 arch wpa_supplicant[450]: Successfully initialized wpa_supplicant
Jun 22 11:28:11 arch wpa_supplicant[450]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-REGDOM-CHANGE init=DRIVER type=WORLD
Jun 22 11:28:15 arch wpa_supplicant[450]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-REGDOM-CHANGE init=DRIVER type=COUNTRY alpha2=DE
Jun 22 11:28:15 arch wpa_supplicant[450]: wlan0: SME: Trying to authenticate with c8:67:5e:84:80:a4 (SSID='eduroam' freq=5620 MHz)
Jun 22 11:28:15 arch wpa_supplicant[450]: wlan0: Trying to associate with c8:67:5e:84:80:a4 (SSID='eduroam' freq=5620 MHz)
Jun 22 11:28:15 arch wpa_supplicant[450]: wlan0: Associated with c8:67:5e:84:80:a4
Jun 22 11:28:15 arch wpa_supplicant[450]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-SUBNET-STATUS-UPDATE status=0
Jun 22 11:28:15 arch wpa_supplicant[450]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-EAP-STARTED EAP authentication started
Jun 22 11:28:16 arch wpa_supplicant[450]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-EAP-FAILURE EAP authentication failed
Jun 22 11:28:18 arch wpa_supplicant[450]: wlan0: Authentication with c8:67:5e:84:80:a4 timed out.
Jun 22 11:28:18 arch wpa_supplicant[450]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED bssid=c8:67:5e:84:80:a4 reason=3 locally_generated=1
Jun 22 11:28:18 arch wpa_supplicant[450]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-SSID-TEMP-DISABLED id=1 ssid="eduroam" auth_failures=1 duration=10 reason=AUTH_FAILED

In contrast, here is the log whenever wpa_supplicant succeeds after rebooting.

Jun 22 11:33:30 arch wpa_supplicant[440]: Successfully initialized wpa_supplicant
Jun 22 11:33:31 arch wpa_supplicant[440]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-REGDOM-CHANGE init=DRIVER type=WORLD
Jun 22 11:33:34 arch wpa_supplicant[440]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-REGDOM-CHANGE init=DRIVER type=COUNTRY alpha2=DE
Jun 22 11:33:34 arch wpa_supplicant[440]: wlan0: SME: Trying to authenticate with c8:67:5e:84:80:a4 (SSID='eduroam' freq=5620 MHz)
Jun 22 11:33:34 arch wpa_supplicant[440]: wlan0: Trying to associate with c8:67:5e:84:80:a4 (SSID='eduroam' freq=5620 MHz)
Jun 22 11:33:34 arch wpa_supplicant[440]: wlan0: Associated with c8:67:5e:84:80:a4
Jun 22 11:33:34 arch wpa_supplicant[440]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-SUBNET-STATUS-UPDATE status=0
Jun 22 11:33:34 arch wpa_supplicant[440]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-EAP-STARTED EAP authentication started
Jun 22 11:33:34 arch wpa_supplicant[440]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-EAP-PROPOSED-METHOD vendor=0 method=25
Jun 22 11:33:34 arch wpa_supplicant[440]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-EAP-METHOD EAP vendor 0 method 25 (PEAP) selected
Jun 22 11:33:35 arch wpa_supplicant[440]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-EAP-PEER-CERT depth=2 subject='/C=US/O=DigiCert Inc/OU=www.digicert.com/CN=DigiCert Assured ID Root CA' hash=3e9099b5015e8f486c00bcea9d111ee721faba355a89bcf1df69561e3dc6325c
Jun 22 11:33:35 arch wpa_supplicant[440]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-EAP-PEER-CERT depth=2 subject='/C=US/O=DigiCert Inc/OU=www.digicert.com/CN=DigiCert Assured ID Root CA' hash=3e9099b5015e8f486c00bcea9d111ee721faba355a89bcf1df69561e3dc6325c
Jun 22 11:33:35 arch wpa_supplicant[440]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-EAP-PEER-CERT depth=1 subject='/C=NL/ST=Noord-Holland/L=Amsterdam/O=TERENA/CN=TERENA SSL CA 3' hash=beb8efe9b1a73c841b375a90e5fff8048848e3a2af66f6c4dd7b938d6fe8c5d8
Jun 22 11:33:35 arch wpa_supplicant[440]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-EAP-PEER-CERT depth=0 subject='/C=DK/L=K\xC3\xB8benhavn/O=K\xC3\xB8benhavns Universitet/OU=KU-IT/CN=radius.ku.dk' hash=20ff551ceeb02b45612faf54b12339ba3f46aa65dc25b24236fa72eff25c8074
Jun 22 11:33:35 arch wpa_supplicant[440]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-EAP-PEER-ALT depth=0 DNS:radius.ku.dk
Jun 22 11:33:35 arch wpa_supplicant[440]: EAP-MSCHAPV2: Authentication succeeded
Jun 22 11:33:35 arch wpa_supplicant[440]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-EAP-SUCCESS EAP authentication completed successfully
Jun 22 11:33:35 arch wpa_supplicant[440]: wlan0: PMKSA-CACHE-ADDED c8:67:5e:84:80:a4 1
Jun 22 11:33:35 arch wpa_supplicant[440]: wlan0: WPA: Key negotiation completed with c8:67:5e:84:80:a4 [PTK=CCMP GTK=CCMP]
Jun 22 11:33:35 arch wpa_supplicant[440]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-CONNECTED - Connection to c8:67:5e:84:80:a4 completed [id=1 id_str=]

Might it be that I'm dealing with a hardware problem? If so, what are my options?