How to troubleshoot why ath0 can't connect to a passwordless wireless network?

[Sean C. Farley]

On Mon, 9 Feb 2009, Yuri wrote:

> I have a several wireless networks without password that my linux box 
> easily connects to.

What version of wpa_supplicant does the Linux box run?

> On FreeBSD 'ifconfig ath0 up scan' command shows it. 'ifconfig ath0 
> ssid <my-ssid> up' brings interface to 'associated' state. But 
> dhclient fails to set it up.
>
> I have another device on the same system: ral0. It sometimes connects 
> to these networks ok, sometimes has the same problem.
>
> What can I do to understand what may be a problem with ath0 in my 
> case?
>
> I tried to use tcpdump. It shows outbound DHCP packets and nothing is 
> inbound.
>
> I asked similar question here before, somebody asked me to downgrade 
> atheros driver to one particular lower version. But this didn't help.
>
> Relevant dmesg lines are:
> ath_hal: 0.9.30.13 (AR5210, AR5211, AR5212, AR5216, RF5111, RF5112, RF2413, 
> RF5413, RF2133)
> ath0: <Atheros 5212> mem 0xcffe0000-0xcffeffff irq 16 at device 5.0 on pci0
> ath0: mac 7.8 phy 4.5 radio 5.6

I had a lot of trouble with ath(4) and my work's wireless network (Aruba 
Networks based).  After patching wpa_supplicant from 0.5.10 to 0.5.11, 
everything has worked well.  Before, it would associate, yet DHCP would 
not work.

Sam Leffler (sam@) has since committed it to CURRENT.  I still have the 
original patch to RELENG_7[1] that the CURRENT patch was based upon.  It 
is a bit old, yet I think it may still apply at least for the most part.

Sean
   1. http://people.freebsd.org/~scf/wpa_supplicant-0.5.11-RELENG_7.patch
-- 
scf at FreeBSD.org