Arch Linux

semperfiguy

Member

Registered: 2007-12-03

Posts: 224

[Solved] General wireless and netcfg2 help

Okay, so I'm new to arch, I installed it and was using it happily for about a week when I did an update to ndiswrapper and suddenly my networking started getting flaky.  I was using netcfg2 to configure my network and it worked great until this update. 

Right now the only way to get networking going is if my relevant section of rc.conf looks like this:

lo="lo 127.0.0.1"
# eth0="dhcp"
wlan0="dhcp"

wlan_wlan0="wlan0 essid Myneta"
## WLAN_INTERFACES=()
WLAN_INTERFACES=(wlan0)

## INTERFACES=(lo)
INTERFACES=(lo wlan0)

# Enter your profile to load on startup in here.
NETWORKS=()
## NETWORKS=(home_mynet54g)

Then it connectects to a unencrypted network fine.  But if I decide to run netcfg2  home_mynet54g it disconnects me and I have no way to reconnect except reboot.  So my first question is: how do I manually connect?

If I run iwconfig wlan0 essid Myneta, iwconfig returns this:

wlan0     IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:"Myneta"  
      Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412 GHz  Access Point: 00:14:51:6B:07:FF   
      Bit Rate=54 Mb/s   Tx-Power:25 dBm   
      RTS thr:2347 B   Fragment thr:2346 B   
      Encryption key:off
      Power Management:off
      Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
      Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
      Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

then I would run ifconfig wlan0 up right? but I am not connected.  So how do I manually from command line connect to an unencrypted network?

and my second question:  When I run netcfg2 home_mynet54g, it gives me a error: wireless association failed. What does that mean and how do I fix it?

my home_mynet54g profile is:

CONNECTION="wireless"
INTERFACE=wlan0
SCAN="yes"
SECURITY="wpa"
ESSID="mynet54g"
KEY="**********"
IP="dhcp"
TIMEOUT=20

Last edited by semperfiguy (2007-12-28 14:52:01)

semperfiguy

Member

Registered: 2007-12-03

Posts: 224

Re: [Solved] General wireless and netcfg2 help

No one can tell me how to manually connect to an unencrypted network? to restate what I am doing, I run

ifconfig wlan0 down
dhclient -r wlan0
iwconfig wlan0 essid homenetwork
ifconfig wlan0 up

running iwconfig shows that I have the correct network, but it never actually goes and obtains an ip address, is there a step I am missing here?

miggols99

Member

Registered: 2007-06-10

Posts: 424

Re: [Solved] General wireless and netcfg2 help

I think you need to run

dhcpcd wlan0

to get an IP address since you are using DHCP.

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semperfiguy

Member

Registered: 2007-12-03

Posts: 224

Re: [Solved] General wireless and netcfg2 help

Thank you, that worked.
So I am running these commands:

ifconfig wlan0 down
dhclient -r wlan0 
iwconfig wlan0 essid Myessid
dhcpcd wlan0
ifconfig wlan0 up

now, when I run dhcpcd wlan0 I get an error saying that dhcpcd-wlan0 is already running so I have to killall dhcpcd in order to get it to work.

peart

Member

From: Kanuckistan

Registered: 2003-07-28

Posts: 510

Re: [Solved] General wireless and netcfg2 help

You should run the dhcpcd command after bringing the interface up.  Also, you are mixing dhclient and dhcpcd commands.  Only one of them should be used.

I think this would work better:

dhcpcd -k wlan0 
ifconfig wlan0 down
iwconfig wlan0 essid Myessid
ifconfig wlan0 up
dhcpcd wlan0

Also, you say you have an unencrypted network, but you use SECURITY="wpa" in your netcfg2 profile.  Should this not be set to "none"?

semperfiguy

Member

Registered: 2007-12-03

Posts: 224

Re: [Solved] General wireless and netcfg2 help

There are two seperate networks, one is unencrypted (which I am connected to right now manually) and the other Is wpa encrypted.  I was connecting to the WPA network with netcfg2, but that is not working now, it gives me a wireless association failed error.  When I run iwconfig after netcfg2 WPA_network, it returns that I am not connected to any network.

iphitus

Forum Fellow

From: Melbourne, Australia

Registered: 2004-10-09

Posts: 4,927

Re: [Solved] General wireless and netcfg2 help

I've had a few complaints, a recent kernel or ndiswrapper update has messed something up. Please file a bug on the bug tracker and state the versions involved. It's definitely not a netcfg2 issue.

semperfiguy

Member

Registered: 2007-12-03

Posts: 224

Re: [Solved] General wireless and netcfg2 help

yup that was it. downgraded ndiswrapper, ndiswrapper-utils, and the kernel. so now it works.