[2008.9] Wifi very unreliable
Alex Osborne
ato at meshy.org
Tue Sep 30 12:11:48 CEST 2008
Matthias Apitz wrote:
> I'm trying to bring up the eth0 with
>
> # ifup eth0
>
> this works very unreliable; in (let's say) 8 of 10 cases it can't
> associate to the AP, even not after fresh re-boots and independently if
> the AP at my home works with WEP or in my office with WPA;
>
I found that with wpa_supplicant there was a problem with disconnecting
from an AP. The essid would apparantly not get cleared properly on the
card (although iwconfig would show it as cleared) and until you manually
cleared it, wpa_supplicant would just sit in a loop trying to connect
and getting authentication timeouts. You can see these message if you
run wpa_cli. I worked around it by adding a pre-up that clears the essid:
allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet manual
wpa-driver wext
wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
pre-up iwconfig eth0 essid off
iface default inet dhcp
iface home inet dhcp
This seems to work reliably for me except that I still have to ifdown
and ifup when I move to a different AP. So if manually connecting with
iwconfig works for you, you could try same workaround. Here's what my
wpa_supplicant.conf looks like:
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
network={
ssid="XXXXXXX"
key_mgmt=NONE
wep_key0=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
wep_tx_keyidx=0
id_str="home"
}
network={
key_mgmt=NONE
}
Note that this is with Debian, not 2008.9 -- I'm not sure whether
Om2008.9 supports exactly the same /etc/network/interfaces syntax as Debian.
Cheers,
Alex
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