Wifi not working properly

MickeyKnox · 2012-06-20 15:22:30

I have a Samsung N150 Netbook with a Atheros Communications Inc. AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter.

I ran both wicd and networkmanager. wicd can't connect at all, networkmanager can, but the connection
dies after like 10 seconds.

I have another Laptop running Ubuntu, which uses networkmanager, which just works, and i recently had
an Android, which also worked just fine. Also, other people use this wlan with various devices.

However, this used to work on this very Netbook running arch. It was always a little problematic, but
acceptable. I used wicd exclusively that time. But for some time now, it's not usable anymore.

I have no more specific information, because i have no idea, what to dig for.

Any help or suggestion is highly appreciated.

Trilby · 2012-06-20 16:34:44

Can you go through the manual connection steps (described on the managing wireless connections section of the wiki)?

This would allow you to see what step fails.

Also, the wireless wiki page has the commands to figure out what card you have and what driver to install. Can you show the ouput of those commands as well as which driver(s) you've installed.

Last edited by Trilby (2012-06-20 16:36:35)

MickeyKnox · 2012-06-20 18:54:30

Ok, i did the manual configuration steps. When i ran wpa_supplicant, it connected - once!
There was a message, i don't recall it exactly, which clearly stated, that the
connection succeeded. However, this was just once, i couldn't reproduce this. On my
recent attempts to connect it said the authentication timed out.

As i described earlier, i have a Atheros AR9285 adapter. According to the wireless
wiki page, the ath9k driver is the one for my card. It was already loaded, according
to lsmod.

I just spoke to somebody also using this wlan. He told me that he tried connecting
from an archlinux installation and couldn't make it work. However, when he tried
it with an Ubuntu installation, it just worked. This seems very strange to me...

Trilby · 2012-06-20 19:07:10

Please try to copy the output directly. This could be much more useful than trying to remember what the output was.

If wpa_supplicant worked once, then you may be on the right track. The times it failed, was the previous instance still running? Could your wpa_supplicant.conf been changed?

I have a wifi connector tool in my signature that might be worth trying. Before you do move/rename your wpa_supplicant.conf to start fresh. If it works we can walk through the steps that the script uses so you can implement them on your own. If it fails you can tell me just were it fails and this could give more information to work with.

MickeyKnox · 2012-06-20 19:33:51

Yes, sorry, but i don't have the output anymore.

No, the previous instance was not running (i did a reboot). And no,
i did not change wpa_supplicant.conf.

I will try your tool tomorrow and report back. Thanks for your help so far.

MickeyKnox · 2012-06-21 15:02:56

Hey Trilby, i tried your script. Looks quite nice, i might even going to use it
regularly, if i get it running.

Scanning the networks works. When i pick my network, DHCP starts. That is
unfortunate, because this network has no DHCP

Anyway, i just deleted that part in your script. Now the script terminates
immediately after i pick my network.

By reading your script, it seems to do basically what i did by hand before.
I'm still stuck at not getting wpa_supplicant to connect properly.

Trilby · 2012-06-21 15:52:44

Glad you liked the script - it is a work in progress as I'm also learning about wireless networking.

One thing the script doesn't do that would be worth checking is if you are using the right "backend". wpa_supplicant uses wext by default unless otherwise specified. I know virtually nothing about these options, but the man page lists madwifi with Atheros in parentheses. Do you need to (and have you) used madwifi in place of wext? [Again, I'm far outside my knowledge on this part, so ignore if you know better ... but if this is new to you too, it could be worth looking into.]

MickeyKnox · 2012-06-21 21:08:53

Thanks for the tip, i tried it, but i get:

Unsupported driver: 'madwifi'.

When i run wpa_supplicant without arguments, madwifi is not listed among the drivers.

Maybe i have to recompile wpa_supplicant with madwifi support?

Trilby · 2012-06-21 21:18:42

I'd read up or ask around about that first - I was grasping at straws with that idea. Hopefully someone else will know better.

I did see a suggestion on the wiki that your card's power management may cause problems with some kernels. The suggestion is

iwconfig wlan0 power off

That is a misleading command: it doesn't turn the power off on your wireless, it turns off power-management.

Gusar · 2012-06-21 21:19:20

The madwifi driver is obsolete. All drivers nowadays use netlink, so -Dnl80211 should be used with wpa_supplicant. -Dwext works too because of a compatibility module.

I don't think this has anything to do with your issue though. Things to try are disabling hardware encryption (use "modinfo ath9k" to learn how to do that, every driver names the option differently), or trying the lts kernel. Then there's wireless-compat, also a thing to try.

MickeyKnox · 2012-06-22 12:46:48

Turning powermanagement off had no effect.

I tried the lts kernel, also with no effect.

modinfo ath9k gives me this:
parm: nohwcrypt:Disable hardware encryption (int)
Can you expand on what to do with this information?

What do you mean by wireless-compat? Are you referring to some compat-wireless-*
packages in the AUR?

Anyway, i have some actual output i want to share. This output looks, like it works:

$ sudo wpa_supplicant -iwlan0 -Dnl80211 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
Trying to authenticate with 00:1c:10:1c:78:4d (SSID='FREUDINET' freq=2412 MHz)
Trying to associate with 00:1c:10:1c:78:4d (SSID='FREUDINET' freq=2412 MHz)
Associated with 00:1c:10:1c:78:4d
CTRL-EVENT-EAP-STARTED EAP authentication started
CTRL-EVENT-EAP-PROPOSED-METHOD vendor=0 method=25
CTRL-EVENT-EAP-METHOD EAP vendor 0 method 25 (PEAP) selected
CTRL-EVENT-EAP-PEER-CERT depth=3 subject='/C=DE/O=Deutsche Telekom AG/OU=T-TeleSec Trust Center/CN=Deutsche Telekom Root CA 2'
CTRL-EVENT-EAP-PEER-CERT depth=2 subject='/C=DE/O=DFN-Verein/OU=DFN-PKI/CN=DFN-Verein PCA Global - G01'
CTRL-EVENT-EAP-PEER-CERT depth=1 subject='/C=DE/ST=Baden-Wuerttemberg/L=Karlsruhe/O=Karlsruhe Institute of Technology/OU=Steinbuch Centre for Computing/CN=KIT-CA/emailAddress=ca@kit.edu'
CTRL-EVENT-EAP-PEER-CERT depth=0 subject='/C=DE/O=Karlsruhe Institute of Technology/OU=HFK Netzwerk/CN=hfkldap.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de'
EAP-MSCHAPV2: Authentication succeeded
EAP-TLV: TLV Result - Success - EAP-TLV/Phase2 Completed
CTRL-EVENT-EAP-SUCCESS EAP authentication completed successfully

... but i could not connect or ping anything, not even in the local network.
After a few seconds, i get this:

Authentication with 00:18:39:6b:d8:01 timed out.
CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED bssid=00:00:00:00:00:00 reason=3
CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED bssid=00:00:00:00:00:00 reason=3
Trying to authenticate with 00:1c:10:1c:78:4d (SSID='FREUDINET' freq=2412 MHz)
Trying to associate with 00:1c:10:1c:78:4d (SSID='FREUDINET' freq=2412 MHz)
Associated with 00:1c:10:1c:78:4d
CTRL-EVENT-EAP-STARTED EAP authentication started
CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED bssid=00:1c:10:1c:78:4d reason=4
Trying to authenticate with 00:18:39:6b:d8:01 (SSID='FREUDINET' freq=2452 MHz)
Trying to associate with 00:18:39:6b:d8:01 (SSID='FREUDINET' freq=2452 MHz)
Associated with 00:18:39:6b:d8:01
CTRL-EVENT-EAP-STARTED EAP authentication started
CTRL-EVENT-EAP-PROPOSED-METHOD vendor=0 method=25
CTRL-EVENT-EAP-METHOD EAP vendor 0 method 25 (PEAP) selected
EAP-TLV: TLV Result - Success - EAP-TLV/Phase2 Completed

and this goes on and on.

Sometimes it doesn't work at all:

$ sudo wpa_supplicant -iwlan0 -Dwext -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
Trying to associate with 00:18:39:6b:d8:01 (SSID='FREUDINET' freq=2452 MHz)
Associated with 00:18:39:6b:d8:01
Authentication with 00:18:39:6b:d8:01 timed out.
CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED bssid=00:00:00:00:00:00 reason=0

MickeyKnox · 2012-07-04 14:45:02

I tested wlan at my university with wicd and it worked just fine.

I also tried it again with networkmanager at my residence. My first report
of the connection dying after like 10 seconds seems to be wrong; the
connection is just very unstable, it comes and goes arbitrarely.

Also, i just spoke to the guy responsible for maintaining the wlan
infrastructure, he refuses to the idea, that there might be something
wrong, since there are many people actively using this wlan with various
systems, among them Windows 7, Ubuntu, MacOS, Android, iOS...

It uses radius for authentification, in case that helps.

It looks like, my netbook works in general, but i'm just having a problem
with this wlan in particular.

Still, i would like to know, what is the magic networkmanager does to get
at least a crappy connection, while wicd and using wpa_supplicant directely
just fails?

Also, if somebody got an idea, what might be funny with the wlan infrastructure
in my residence, if i bring something specific to the table, i might be able
to influence its configuration.

OU812 · 2012-07-05 03:19:45

Hello. I got my wireless connection by installing netcfg. To test it, I ran

#wifi-menu

in a terminal and was able to connect to my home network. Then I used this wiki:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Netcfg

to get my install set up to connect to my network during boot. No tray icon, but I use gkrellm to help monitor my connection.

Hope this helps.

john

Arch Linux

#1 2012-06-20 15:22:30

Wifi not working properly

#2 2012-06-20 16:34:44

Re: Wifi not working properly

#3 2012-06-20 18:54:30

Re: Wifi not working properly

#4 2012-06-20 19:07:10

Re: Wifi not working properly

#5 2012-06-20 19:33:51

Re: Wifi not working properly

#6 2012-06-21 15:02:56

Re: Wifi not working properly

#7 2012-06-21 15:52:44

Re: Wifi not working properly

#8 2012-06-21 21:08:53

Re: Wifi not working properly

#9 2012-06-21 21:18:42

Re: Wifi not working properly

#10 2012-06-21 21:19:20

Re: Wifi not working properly

#11 2012-06-22 12:46:48

Re: Wifi not working properly

#12 2012-07-04 14:45:02

Re: Wifi not working properly

#13 2012-07-05 03:19:45

Re: Wifi not working properly

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