wireless configuration

[tmetro-blu-5a1Jt6qxUNc at public.gmane.org (Tom Metro)]

johnmalloy-Wuw85uim5zDR7s880joybQ at public.gmane.org wrote:
> It seems the wpasupplicant is taking too long to connect to the wireless
> access point and the dhclient is not working.

If I understand correctly, if wpasupplicant fails, then you have failed
to establish a connection to the LAN, and DHCP is irrelevant. So that
would mean dhclient not working is a symptom, rather than the problem.

Or are you saying that wpasupplicant works, just not before dhclient is
invoked? If that's the case, then you've got a broken setup, as dhclient
should be event triggered.

Your rc.local would explain this, as it shows that wpa_supplicant is
being invoked in an atypical manner, and dhclient is being invoked after
a fixed delay (180 seconds), also atypical. (Assuming the line that
invokes dhclient isn't normally commented out.)


> If I run it manually, it works.

By that you mean what's in rc.local, or you mean after you boot and the
rc.local stuff fails to work, you then manually run the dhclient with a
command similar to the last line in rc.local?

You normally wouldn't need to call wpa_supplicant from rc.local. I'd
start by commenting out all 3 of these lines:

#echo "/sbin/wpa_supplicant ...
#sleep 180
#echo "/sbin/dhclient ...


> echo "/sbin/wpa_supplicant -ira0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/ra0.conf -d 2>&1 > /var/log/wpa_supplicant.ra0 "|/usr/bin/at now

I gather that was an attempt to run wpa_supplicant with a custom config,
and I'm guessing they scheduled it to run through 'at' so it would run
in the background? (Not clear why they didn't just use '&'.)

If the WPA stuff doesn't work with this commented out, then you might
need to set up the connection properly in Network Manager.

Not know what circumstances led to this custom setup, it's hard to say
whether it is still required. It may have been something necessary to
work around deficiencies in the wireless driver that was packaged with
older version of Ubuntu.

The quick hack is likely to just boost the "180" to something greater,
though 3 minutes is already a pretty long time to wait for a network
connection to establish.

The ra0 suggests a Ralink driver. The Ubuntu wiki has some documents
that may be relevant:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WifiDocs/RalinkRT2500?action=fullsearch&context=180&value=ralink&titlesearch=Titles

There may be wpa_supplicant configuration settings that will address the
problem.
http://w1.fi/wpa_supplicant/

Perhaps those have already been figured out in
/etc/wpa_supplicant/ra0.conf. In which case, the objective should be to
figure out how to get wpa_supplicant to use a custom tweaked config,
while still playing nice with the standard Network Manager infrastructure.


> here is my /etc/rc.local file:
> 
> /etc/opt/elo-ser/setup/elorc start

Do you know what this is for?


> Are there any other web sites/listservs for this issue?

Ubuntu Forums is the obvious one: http://ubuntuforums.org/index.php


Gregory Boyce wrote:
> You can try increasing the timeout for dhclient in
> /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf.  I've seen issues in the with dhclient
> timing out too early when using wpa_supplication on 802.1x wired
> networks.

Do you know why that would happen in a normal case, where dhclient is
event triggered, instead of time delay triggered?

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/