dhclient and random disconnects

[jb]

David Demelier <demelier.david <at> gmail.com> writes:

> 
> Hi,
> 
> In my university, I have a WPA-EAP wifi access point, it requires 
> authentification to access, with dhclient, I'm disconnected randomly and 
> I must run wpa_cli reconfigure / dhclient again to get it working.

This is really too general - it could be a problem with AP or your box.
When you say randomly, do you mean like every hour or so, or every 10 min or
so ? What is the pattern ?
Does it happen that your box is left alone for extended period of time, that
is without user and active application activity, while being connected ? If
so, do you find your box disconnected after such time (what is the time
interval) ?
Do the disconnects happen at IP lease renewal times (see output below) ?

> What could the problem be with dhclient? I don't know very well what 
> these processes are doing. Does the process check for lease by a 
> specific interval?

Yes, it does IP lease renewal.

Post to the list the following outputs while using dhclient:

Your wireless configuration (relevant data only):
$ cat /etc/rc.conf

Review /etc/defaults/rc.conf w/r to dhclient and wpa_supplicant.

Do you have anything related to your wireless card driver in loader(8)
tunables or sysctl(8) variables ?

Your wpa_supplicant_conf_file, presumably:
$ cat /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

$ ps auxwww | grep -i dhclient

Config file:
$ cat /etc/dhclient.conf

Your lease renewal log file:
# cat /var/db/dhclient.leases.????

$ ifconfig -a

$ netstat -s

Any wireless card driver related messages (substitute wpi for yours):
$ grep -i wpi /var/log/messages

After that spend some time with:
$ apropos dhclient
dhclient(8)              - Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) client
dhclient-script(8)       - DHCP client network configuration script
dhclient.conf(5)         - DHCP client configuration file
dhclient.leases(5)       - DHCP client lease database

You should not hesitate to contact, if possible, your Uni sys admin and ask
about it.

By now you should be an expert - after all you use FreeBSD for a reason :-)

jb