Cannot connect to wireless network

hybrid-kernel · 2008-06-24 17:34:50

Chipset: bcm4318
Laptop: Acer aspire 5002
Driver: b43 + b43-fwcutter
Tools: wicd, knetworkmanager, wlassistant, rutilt
Network: wpa, although doesn't work when unsecured as well

The card can scan and see all the networks just fine, but it never actually connects although according to my router (running dd-wrt) it does. When using wicd, it usually fails on "obtaining ip address" but sometimes freezes on "generating wpa config file" (or something along those lines). The card worked fine under debian. I've been at this for 3 hours now and no progress.

Please and thnx.

ibendiben · 2008-06-24 17:46:00

Did you install wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd?
What if you kill all GUI apps, and connect manually?

Try this (as root):

dhcpcd -x wlan0
ifconfig wlan0 up
iwconfig wlan0 essid "XXXXX" key "YYYYYYYY"
iwlist wlan0 scan
dhcpcd wlan0

exchange wlan0 with your divice name!
Post outputs here.

bmccullo · 2008-07-14 03:17:10

I'll use this thread since it also applies to me. I've looked everywhere, and cannot seem to find a solution. I am really excited to use Archlinux for this system, but I can't get past this issue...

Laptop: Dell Inspiron 3800
Wireless NIC: Netgear WG511v2 (Marvell chipset, pcmcia card)
Driver: ndiswrapper
Tools: Base install, wireless tools, (no ethernet jack to plug in, so only what came on cd)

NDISWRAPPER is installed correctly, and the card is recognized by the system. It can scan for available networks, but cannot connect. I am currently working with an unprotected network for troubleshooting purposes.

This is in my /etc/rc.conf:

lo="Lo 127.0.0.1"
wlan0="dhcp"
wlan_wlan0="wlan0 essid <my_essid>"
INTERFACES=(wlan0)

It appears that the process is timing out at boot time. Also, the ndiswrapper module is loaded at start.

This all works fine...

dhcpcd -x wlan0
ifconfig wlan0 up
iwconfig wlan0 essid "XXXXX"
iwlist wlan0 scan

This...

dhcpcd wlan0

Produces this...

err, wlan0: timed out
warn, wlan0: using IPV4LL address 169.254.67.214

Where does this IP address come from??

SiC · 2008-07-18 13:34:04

hybrid-kernel wrote:

Chipset: bcm4318
Laptop: Acer aspire 5002
Driver: b43 + b43-fwcutter
Tools: wicd, knetworkmanager, wlassistant, rutilt
Network: wpa, although doesn't work when unsecured as well
The card can scan and see all the networks just fine, but it never actually connects although according to my router (running dd-wrt) it does. When using wicd, it usually fails on "obtaining ip address" but sometimes freezes on "generating wpa config file" (or something along those lines). The card worked fine under debian. I've been at this for 3 hours now and no progress.
Please and thnx.

Using GUI utilities insulates you from the actual process of getting a wireless connection up and running. You are much better understanding the actual process of how Linux sets up wireless, so here is a quick tutorial on how to manually set your connection up.

Set your router to use WPA and set your passphrase to whatever you want, make sure you remember what it is Also for ease, set your passphrase and SSID to be lowercase.

Next thing you need to do is to setup your wpasupplicant configuration. WPA Supplicant is the Linux utility which handles the authentication for WPA connections to a router. It does other things too, but for now assume it does nothing else.

In your /etc folder you will find a file called wpa_supplicant.conf. This is the place where all the configuration settings are kept for wpa_supplicant. It's contents are quite simple, although the sample file that is provided is horribly obtuse and not very good at giving you and idea of what is going on. Basically it stores a couple of bits of information, such as the SSID and WPA passphrase for the access point.

Unfortunately you cannot just type in the passphrase cleanly, you need to encode it into a hexadecimal string. Now how do you do that I hear you ask, well that's quite simple, you use the wpa_passphrase utility, which is supplied as part of the wpa_supplicant package.

So what do you do, well to start with, you open a terminal window, and su to root. I would su because you are going to have to type in quite a few things as root, and it's easier to escalate your privileges once rather than many times.

Once you are logged in as root, move the wpa_supplicant.conf file out of /etc/ and put it somewhere safe, I hate to delete config files, but we don't really need it at this point.

Next what you should do it type in the following:

# wpa_passphrase dantes inferno!

this should generate something like the below:

network={
ssid="dantes"
#psk="inferno!"
psk=b90e230f1f2f5361a9b2d3acf276745ee3c751c0724a3b0052d6df15ec420e69
}

This is the basic configuration you need to get wpa working. As you can see it produces a number of lines, which should be self explanatory.

The first line is the opening statement for the network, the second is the ssid of the base station you are wanting to connect to, the third line the passphrase, and the fourth the hex key which is required to connect.

Note that this is in plain text here, so you may want to change the permissions on the /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file if you are overly security conscious and you don't want someone finding that information out if they have access to the machine. I don't particularly worry about that very much myself.

Now that you have seen how wpa_passphrase works, do the following (still logged in as root remember)

# wpa_passphrase [ssid] [passphrase] > /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

changing the details where applicable to your own specific information. This will then create a basic wpa_supplicant.conf with all the relevant details in for you to use. If you want to add another network later (say your favourite coffee shops wifi link) you can change the single > to a double >> and append it to the file.

There are a large number of options which are available to set under the network which you can investigate by looking at the original configuration file. In most cases you can use the defaults, and not specify anything further in that section at the moment.

You do however need to add a couple of lines at the top of the configuration file, you can probably get away with not setting them at this point, but it's worth adding it as it only takes a few seconds.

So fire up your favourite editor.

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=wheel

Now that has been done you can try connecting manually.

First thing to do is to bring your wifi interface up, I am assuming for the purposes of this that your wireless interface is wlan0.

# ifconfig wlan0 up

then you need to set the interface to use the access point so issue

# iwconfig wlan0 essid [ssid]

Once you have done this, you need to run wpa_supplicant to connect, usually you will be able to use the wireless extensions driver for wpa_supplicant, if you cannot, then you might need to check how to do it with your wireless device on the internet.

So issue the following:

# wpa_supplicant -Dwext -i wlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf &

This should give you a load of information about what wpa_supplicant is doing. However you should see a line that says something along the lines of Associated: followed by a MAC address. This means that you are connected to your base station. All that is required now is that you get an IP address, so issue

# dhcpcd wlan0 &

and then check the IP address using ifconfig, and you should get something along the lines of what I get below:

[root@hercules ~]# ifconfig
lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:242 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:242 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:16999 (16.6 Kb) TX bytes:16999 (16.6 Kb)

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1C:BF:66:4E:E0
inet addr:192.168.0.62 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::21c:bfff:fe66:4ee0/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:140387 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:96902 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:125513183 (119.6 Mb) TX bytes:12299192 (11.7 Mb)

wmaster0 Link encap:UNSPEC HWaddr 00-1C-BF-66-4E-E0-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)

[root@hercules ~]#

If you do you are now connected. If so you can investigate using the netcfg2 scripts to setup this on a more permanent arrangement and get it working when you start the machine.

Hope that helps anyway. If you already knew this, then my apologies

SiC · 2008-07-18 13:39:10

bmccullo wrote:

I'll use this thread since it also applies to me. I've looked everywhere, and cannot seem to find a solution. I am really excited to use Archlinux for this system, but I can't get past this issue...
Laptop: Dell Inspiron 3800
Wireless NIC: Netgear WG511v2 (Marvell chipset, pcmcia card)
Driver: ndiswrapper
Tools: Base install, wireless tools, (no ethernet jack to plug in, so only what came on cd)
NDISWRAPPER is installed correctly, and the card is recognized by the system. It can scan for available networks, but cannot connect. I am currently working with an unprotected network for troubleshooting purposes.
This is in my /etc/rc.conf:
lo="Lo 127.0.0.1"
wlan0="dhcp"
wlan_wlan0="wlan0 essid <my_essid>"
INTERFACES=(wlan0)
It appears that the process is timing out at boot time. Also, the ndiswrapper module is loaded at start.
This all works fine...
dhcpcd -x wlan0
ifconfig wlan0 up
iwconfig wlan0 essid "XXXXX"
iwlist wlan0 scan
This...
dhcpcd wlan0
Produces this...
err, wlan0: timed out
warn, wlan0: using IPV4LL address 169.254.67.214
Where does this IP address come from??

That IP address or similar is one assigned by dhcpcd when it is unable to acquire an IP address from a DHCP server. Windows does much the same under the same circumstances. It has it's uses as if you are creating a simple network and have no dhcp server you all end up on the same subnet, and can communicate with each other. Otherwise it tells you that you are unable to acquire an IP address normally. It could be an incompatibility between your wireless driver and your access point. I have this unfortunate issue with my sitecom router, I cannot connect wirelessly under linux on my laptop, although I have no problems connecting anywhere else or using alternate operating systems.

iphitus · 2008-07-19 00:27:04

Usually you get the silly 169 IP from dhcpcd when you havnt associated (you havn't connected to the wireless network). It's like trying to get an IP on a wired connection without plugging the cable in -- of course it won't work.

Give netcfg2 a shot.

insane · 2008-07-23 19:43:44

Dear SiC, you maybe not be expecting this but you are now one of my heroes. Your post will send me to bed 2-3 hours earlier

Arch Linux

#1 2008-06-24 17:34:50

Cannot connect to wireless network

#2 2008-06-24 17:46:00

Re: Cannot connect to wireless network

#3 2008-07-14 03:17:10

Re: Cannot connect to wireless network

#4 2008-07-18 13:34:04

Re: Cannot connect to wireless network

#5 2008-07-18 13:39:10

Re: Cannot connect to wireless network

#6 2008-07-19 00:27:04

Re: Cannot connect to wireless network

#7 2008-07-23 19:43:44

Re: Cannot connect to wireless network

Board footer