GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 354162
NM not connecting after restart
Last modified: 2008-08-16 03:24:31 UTC
I'm trying to fix this problem for quite some time now, but I cannot make any sense of it myself so here's what I get: Accessing my WLAN router from the laptop (ipw2100 card) works fine in unencrypted mode. When I activate WPA (Personal, using passphrase) on the router, the NM loses the connection to the AP as to be expected. I kill the nm-applet, restart dbus (and with it hal/NM) and start the applet again. I have to do that for NM to realize that the network is now protected. I can select the network and it will ask for the password (or keyring password) and it will connect fine. I have tried to re-connect a number of times, works fine still. I then have tried to disable wireless and re-anable, it will still re-connect fine afterwards. I even tried to kill nm-applet, restart dbus/hal/NM and start nm-applet again, even now NM will re-connect fine to the WPA net. BUT: after I reboot the laptop now, I'm unable to connect to the protected net, whatever I do. Only way to get it working again is to switch the AP to unprotected, connect to that and basicly do what I describe above. Then it will work again fine with WPA, but only as long until I reboot. What can be wrong here, any idea? I can provide whatever information you want, so just tell me what you need and I hope we can fix this problem.
So I did complete logs of everything and after google'ing I found that someone on the list postet an error that is extremely similar, namely: http://www.mail-archive.com/networkmanager-list@gnome.org/msg04092.html I don't get the first warning but I get "eal_act_stage2_config (): Activation (eth1/wireless): couldn't connect to the supplicant." too and it just stops doing anything after that. Now what can this mean? I'm using Ubuntu, too, but a newer version. I tried to update to NM HEAD but same problem here. What can actually keep NM to get a connection to wpasupplicant after a reboot? Installed versions: network-manager: 0.6.3 (but also tried HEAD) wpasupplicant: 0.5.4
After seeing another tread about this issue, I came across http://mail.gnome.org/archives/networkmanager-list/2006-March/msg00185.html I noticed that I don't have /var/run/NetworkManager/ so I created it and now the error discribed above does not happen anymore. NM actually connects to the supplicant and that creates /var/run/wpa_supplicant/ and /var/run/wpa_supplicant-global, but it still doesn't get a working WPA connection and asks for the key again after some time.
Update: /var/run/NetworkManager/ wasn't available because I removed the system's startup scripts for NM, because I wanted to run in --no-deamon mode to debug this... Anyway, now the real problem is there again and I'll atach a log of that tomorrow.
Created attachment 72192 [details] Log #1 This is the first log. It's fully commented. It starts with connecting to an unsecured AP, then the AP is switched to WPA and the log shows that NM connects just fine, so my setup can handle WPA...
Created attachment 72193 [details] Log #2 This is the "bad" log, what happens after a reboot. NM finds the AP, sees that it is WPA protected and tries to connect, but it never gets a connection. You can load the two logs in meld or another diff tool, you'll see that the beginning is really the same but at some point, in the second log, something goes wrong but I can't really tell what... I hope someone here can make sense of it and tell me how to fix it.
As posted on the mailing list yesterday I tried to use the new test utility and also plain wpa_supplicant. Yesterday evening this seemed to work fine, both with wpa_supplicant and the testtool. Then I turned on hidden ssid and I couldn't connect anymore, using ap_scan=2 I was abble to get a connection but not always... So I disabled the hidden ssid again and went to bed. This morning I tried again to gather some logs and I was not able to get a connection (to non-hidden wpa), neither with NM, the testtool or wpa_supplicant, which only says: --- Trying to associate with 00:30:f1:bd:15:04 (SSID='paul' freq=0 MHz) Associated with 00:30:f1:bd:15:04 WPA: Key negotiation completed with 00:30:f1:bd:15:04 [PTK=TKIP GTK=TKIP] CTRL-EVENT-CONNECTED - Connection to 00:30:f1:bd:15:04 completed (auth) [id=0 id_str=] WPA: Group rekeying completed with 00:30:f1:bd:15:04 [GTK=TKIP] CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED - Disconnect event - remove keys --- I have NM disabled for now, also disabled WPA again and using plain "connect to open ap" settings wpa_supplicant connected without problems. I will try again later to narrow this down, any help on what I could try would be very welcome.
I'm not entirely sure if my problem is related, but I just changed my AP ESSID from "oldEssid" to "newEssid" (names are not real ;) ) and changed from WEP to WPA-PSK ("personal"). I found out that connecting to "newEssid" did not work nicely through nm-applet. The connection worked only occasionally and signal strength kept bouncing up and down. Also "newEssid" did not show up on nm-applet even though I had connected to it previously. Instead I noticed that "oldEssid" was still there. Using "iwlist scan" reported correct results (no "oldEssid"), but nm-applet still thought it existed. SOLUTION: I had to start gconf-editor and find the settings for "oldEssid" under system->networking->wireless->networks->oldEssid and delete all the key values. Now everything works fine. What I'd recommend is that you first configure your AP correctly (with encryption and all). Then turn off networking and destroy the key values for the old network essid. Don't worry about the folder, it will get destroyed automatically later. Perhaps then you could reboot and add your new network through nm-applet. This problem is related to changing ESSIDs. NM does not seem to automatically recognize that the "oldEssid" is now obsolete.
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 372124 ***