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#1 2011-04-13 06:01:13

erville
Member
From: Philippines
Registered: 2011-04-12
Posts: 15

[resolved] can't connect to university wireless network

Hi, I'm new to Arch and I really would like some help regarding this wireless connectivity problem that I have.

I have an Atheros wireless network card AR9285, which I used ndiswrapper with to install the manufacturer's driver for Windows XP 32 bit. Wireless connectivity works as I was able to connect to a WEP encrypted ad-hoc network that I set-up on my own, using only iwconfig and dhcpcd via terminal. The problem now, is, I couldn't connect to my university's wireless network.

So far, I have tried two methods - (1) iwconfig + dhcpcd and (2) netcfg + wifi-select. I get different error messages from both methods.

METHOD 1:
I make sure that wlan0 is down. Then, I scan for available wireless networks:

iwlist wlan0 scan

To which, I get a lot of wireless networks, including the university wireless network that provides Internet access, "LSWLAN1". Knowing that my device can detect the wireless network, I move on to associating to it:

iwconfig wlan0 essid "LSWLAN1" key b9c2af25dd
ifconfig wlan0 up
dhcpcd wlan0

This is the point where it fails, I get the message

wlan0: waiting for carrier
timed out

As a final attempt to make it work, I tried this suggestion from the wiki for timeout errors:

iwconfig wlan0 channel auto

which just gives me

Error for wireless request "Set Frequency" (8B04) :
     SET failed on device wlan0 ; Invalid argument.

METHOD 2:
I tried netcfg and wifi-select, thinking that automation might help me. I use

wifi-select wlan0

and then select "LSWLAN1" from the list that it generates (actually there are 5-7 of those LSWLAN1 networks, I'm not really sure why our school has those many duplicates, but I just select 1). After that, I input the wep key b9c2af25dd (10 digit hex, not string). Then I get

Invalid SECURITY setting: wep
wep
wep
wep
wep
wep
Failed to connect to wpa_supplicant - wpa_ctrl_open: No such file or directory
Failed to connect to wpa_supplicant - wpa_ctrl_open: No such file or directory
Failed to connect to wpa_supplicant - wpa_ctrl_open: No such file or directory
Failed to connect to wpa_supplicant - wpa_ctrl_open: No such file or directory
Failed to connect to wpa_supplicant - wpa_ctrl_open: No such file or directory
Failed to connect to wpa_supplicant - wpa_ctrl_open: No such file or directory
Failed to connect to wpa_supplicant - wpa_ctrl_open: No such file or directory
Failed to connect to wpa_supplicant - wpa_ctrl_open: No such file or directory

     > WPA Authentication/Association Failed

     > generated profile:

CONNECTION="wireless"
ESSID="LSWLAN1"
INTERFACE="wlan0"
DESCRIPTION="..."
SCAN="yes"
IP="dhcp"
TIMEOUT="10"
SECURITY="wep
wep
wep
wep
wep
wep"
KEY="b9c2af25dd"

I saved the failed configuration file and edited it. I noticed the multiple wep entries so I deleted all the others to leave it to just 1 wep on the SECURITY line. Then I tried

netcfg LSWLAN1

and it gives me

DHCP IP lease attempt failed.

Somebody please help me. I recently traded my big laptop for a netbook because I thought I'd go portable and study in the library, instead of just staying in my room. Besides, Wifi in the library is free. I wouldn't want to end up using a very portable netbook just inside my room, jacked up with a lan cable to get internet access that I would also have to pay for. I am a little worried, sorry.

Any ideas?

Last edited by erville (2011-04-14 01:05:08)

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#2 2011-04-13 06:08:35

ngoonee
Forum Fellow
From: Between Thailand and Singapore
Registered: 2009-03-17
Posts: 7,354

Re: [resolved] can't connect to university wireless network

Are you sure the network is wep security?


Allan-Volunteer on the (topic being discussed) mailn lists. You never get the people who matters attention on the forums.
jasonwryan-Installing Arch is a measure of your literacy. Maintaining Arch is a measure of your diligence. Contributing to Arch is a measure of your competence.
Griemak-Bleeding edge, not bleeding flat. Edge denotes falls will occur from time to time. Bring your own parachute.

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#3 2011-04-13 06:28:59

erville
Member
From: Philippines
Registered: 2011-04-12
Posts: 15

Re: [resolved] can't connect to university wireless network

ngoonee wrote:

Are you sure the network is wep security?

I think so. This is from our library's website:

The Loyola Schools Wireless Local Area Network System is intended primarily for users with mobile computing devices equipped with wireless LAN cards conforming to the IEEE 802.11b standard with Wire Equivalent Privacy (WEP) enabled.

Also, wifi-select indicates that the network is WEP on the list that it generates. So I'm pretty sure it's wep.

On that note, I don't understand why wifi-select gives me multiple "wep" entries in the SECURITY="..." line. Is this a bug? I think this was caused by the multiple number of LSWLAN1 networks (which have the same name or essid) that were detected. Nevertheless, when I tried to correct this by deleting the extra wep entries in the SECURITY="..." line of the profile's config file, I get the

DHCP IP lease attempt failed.

error, after running netcfg.

Any more ideas? Thanks in advance.

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#4 2011-04-13 06:57:18

Jelle
Member
From: Netherlands
Registered: 2011-01-30
Posts: 84

Re: [resolved] can't connect to university wireless network

I'd try some different security settings: at our university the settings should be PEAP with TKIP/MSCHAPV2, but that doesn't work either, although a different protocol does.

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#5 2011-04-13 09:08:18

erville
Member
From: Philippines
Registered: 2011-04-12
Posts: 15

Re: [resolved] can't connect to university wireless network

Thank you for replying, it's working now. Although I'm not still sure how it worked. All I did was kept on issuing this command

netcfg LSWLAN1

with the corrected profile, SECURITY="wep" and key="b9c2af25dd".

At first, the error was

DHCP IP lease attempt failed.

Then after a few more repititions, it changed to something like LSWLAN1 is not present. At that point, I tried scanning and true enough, it didn't find any. I changed the mode to ad-hoc and tried scanning again. It found the networks, but it screwed up the terminal, tty1. There were weird characters all over. I tried scanning again in tty2 and got the same result. Some letters were replaced with ASCII symbols. I rebooted and tried doing netcfg LSWLAN1 again. And for reasons unknown, it finally worked.

Thanks for your time. How do I mark this as solved?

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#6 2011-04-13 09:21:39

hokasch
Member
Registered: 2007-09-23
Posts: 1,461

Re: [resolved] can't connect to university wireless network

Edit your first post, and you can change the title.

AFAIK your chipset is supported natively by ath9k, so you should not need ndiswrapper/windows driver.

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#7 2011-04-13 09:29:58

ngoonee
Forum Fellow
From: Between Thailand and Singapore
Registered: 2009-03-17
Posts: 7,354

Re: [resolved] can't connect to university wireless network

As well, it may simply be that your DHCP timeout is not long enough?


Allan-Volunteer on the (topic being discussed) mailn lists. You never get the people who matters attention on the forums.
jasonwryan-Installing Arch is a measure of your literacy. Maintaining Arch is a measure of your diligence. Contributing to Arch is a measure of your competence.
Griemak-Bleeding edge, not bleeding flat. Edge denotes falls will occur from time to time. Bring your own parachute.

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#8 2011-04-14 01:43:49

erville
Member
From: Philippines
Registered: 2011-04-12
Posts: 15

Re: [resolved] can't connect to university wireless network

hokasch wrote:

Edit your first post, and you can change the title.

AFAIK your chipset is supported natively by ath9k, so you should not need ndiswrapper/windows driver.

Thanks, I think I am quite confident in posting in forums now, now that you've taught me how to edit a post's title. smile)

It actually took me a while to decide on wether I should use ath9k or ndiswrapper. I googled it, and read about it on forums and bug rerports. Ultimately, I decided on using ndiswrapper because of the speed issue. AFAIK ndiswrapper gives faster connection speeds.

Please let me know if ath9k is already at par with ndiswrapper with regards to connection speed, because to be honest I am quite disturbed that I'm using a driver that is not native to Linux. Although I am also quite comforted that the driver was made by the manufacturers themselves, to think that they really have programmed it to work with the device and utilize the device to its full potential. This is just my own personal dilemma though, I might be wrong about my assumptions.


ngoonee wrote:

As well, it may simply be that your DHCP timeout is not long enough?

I tried setting the timeout to 120 before. It didn't work. Thanks for the heads up.

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#9 2011-04-14 13:27:31

hokasch
Member
Registered: 2007-09-23
Posts: 1,461

Re: [resolved] can't connect to university wireless network

I had some problems with ath9k at some point, but it has been perfectly stable for quite a while now. Actually I would generally believe the native solution to be faster since the driver is directly in the kernel, and not wrapped with additional layers around some windows drivers...

That said, there is currently a bug with n networks in 2.6.38 rendering connections nearly useless. The workaround to modprobe with nohwcrypt=1 (add "/etc/modprobe.d/ath9k" containing "options ath9k nohwcrypt=1" works fine here (home router / 100Mbit line):

100%[====>] 111,149,056 3.65M/s   in 25s     
(4.18 MB/s) - “test100mb.bin” saved [111149056/111149056]

As there are so many factors influencing wireless connections, your mileage may vary.

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#10 2011-04-17 14:53:15

erville
Member
From: Philippines
Registered: 2011-04-12
Posts: 15

Re: [resolved] can't connect to university wireless network

hokasch wrote:

I had some problems with ath9k at some point, but it has been perfectly stable for quite a while now. Actually I would generally believe the native solution to be faster since the driver is directly in the kernel, and not wrapped with additional layers around some windows drivers...

That said, there is currently a bug with n networks in 2.6.38 rendering connections nearly useless. The workaround to modprobe with nohwcrypt=1 (add "/etc/modprobe.d/ath9k" containing "options ath9k nohwcrypt=1" works fine here (home router / 100Mbit line):

100%[====>] 111,149,056 3.65M/s   in 25s     
(4.18 MB/s) - “test100mb.bin” saved [111149056/111149056]

As there are so many factors influencing wireless connections, your mileage may vary.

Hi again! I decided to take your advice, and now I'm using ath9k instead of ndiswrapper. I'ts working fine, so far. I even think it's faster than ndiswrapper. But anyway, what about this bug? How do I know if it's an n network? The result of iwconfig wlan0 is  802.11bgn, I don't understand.

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