Manual Wireless Association
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Testing Wireless Connectivity
It's sometimes useful to test out manual connections to access points to help us debug the driver and wireless networking software. First test with plain 'iwconfig' tools, then with 'wpa_supplicant'. WPA and WPA2 are not currently supported, but will be in the future.
Step-by-Step with iwconfig
- Switch to a virtual terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1 (Ctrl+Alt+
)
- Log in as user 'root' with no password
- Stop NetworkManager and network scripts
service NetworkManager stop service network stop
- Use iwconfig to connect, replacing the 'essid' and key as necessary
iwconfig eth0 essid "my-ssid"
or for WEP:
iwconfig eth0 essid "my-ssid" key aaffbbcc667788112233449900
and for apple airport (white UFO) use
iwconfig eth0 essid "Network Name" key s:YourKey
If you need to also specify your access point, you can do so with the "ap" option:
iwconfig eth0 essid "my-ssid" key aaffbbcc667788112233449900 ap 0A:1B:2C:3D:4E:5F
If you want to connect to an ad-hoc-network, use the mode-option:
iwconfig eth0 mode Ad-Hoc essid "my-ssid"
For further settings, see man iwconfig.
- Wait a second or two, then do the following and see if the "Access Point:" and "ESSID" are set to valid values
iwconfig eth0 eth0 IEEE 802.11b ESSID:"my-ssid" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:20:44:5a:b1:a4 Bit Rate:11 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm Sensitivity=8/0 Retry limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:off Link Quality=85/100 Signal level=-45 dBm Noise level=-82 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:7
- Wait another 10 seconds or so, and run 'iwconfig' again to ensure the connection is still active
- Try to acquire network access data from DHCP
/sbin/dhclient -1 eth0
- Or set the IP-address, default gateway and DNS by hand
ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.2 route add default gw 192.168.1.1 echo "nameserver 192.168.1.1" > /etc/resolv.conf
- If the "Access Point:" value is still a valid MAC address (ie, it is not all 0s), the connection is still alive
Step-by-step with wpa_supplicant
- Switch to a virtual terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1 (Ctrl+Alt+
)
- Log in as user 'root' with no password
- Stop NetworkManager and network scripts
service NetworkManager stop service network stop
- Create a wpa_supplicant config file for your network in /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf. It should look something like this:
cat <<EOF > /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf ctrl_interface_group=0 ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant eapol_version=1 ap_scan=1 fast_reauth=1 network={ ssid="my-ssid" key_mgmt=NONE auth_alg=OPEN } <press Ctrl+D here>
- Run wpa_supplicant like this:
/usr/sbin/wpa_supplicant -ddd -ieth0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -Dwext -o local0
- You should see lines like:
wpa_supplicant[1710]: State: ASSOCIATING -> ASSOCIATED wpa_supplicant[1710]: Associated to a new BSS: BSSID=00:cc:aa:34:56:12
- In any case, please copy /var/log/messages and attach it to a bug report
cd /root cp /var/log/messages wpa_supplicant-log.txt bzip2 wpa_supplicant-log.txt
Attach the file /root/wpa_supplicant-log.txt.bz2 to the bug.