The contents of this file, apart from this header, were provided by Tim Williams on 12 Jul 2007

Using Bham Campus Wireless Network with Mandriva
+ Workaround for atheros/madwifi driver bug
(Information provided by Tim Williams)

Problems connecting to the campus network
Using instructions in http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/laptop/wpa/

Symptoms before the cure

I've been watching the output of wpa_gui. It appears to manage to connect and then immediately drop the connection again after a few seconds:

I keep getting 'Disconnect events'. As far as I can tell I never get an IP address. However if I leave the username/password out of the config it never asks me for them, so I suspect it's not getting this far.

According to /var/log/messages dhcp requests are being made.

If I try to start up wpa_supplicant manually (my system usually starts it automatically for any interface configured to use WPA), I get the following error message amongst the connection attempts :

    ioctl[IEEE80211_IOCTL_SETMLME]: Invalid argument
    Association request to driver failed

A partial solution found

I did some digging and eventually found this thread on the madwifi driver home page http://madwifi.org/ticket/539

It would appear that there is bug in the linux atheros/madwifi driver that prevents it from working in wireless g mode with WPA-Enterprise encryption (I use WPA2-PSK at home with no problems).

The bug has yet to be resolved (the last post was on the thread was 25th june if you don't count my addition), but it can be worked around by downgrading to wireless b mode by typing the following as root and then restarting the network interface :

    iwpriv ath0 mode 11b

I've managed to connect to both UOBWLAN and eduroam after using this workaround. I am still experiencing some intermittent connection problems, but I think this is down to the low signal strength.

I'm not sure how common the atheros chipset is, but it is used in a lot of wireless devices, so I can see other people here having this problem.

Finally the mystery has been solved. Hopefully the driver will be fixed soon. Wireless g would be nice, but at least it's working.

Aaron, feel free to add a digest of this bug problem information to your connection help page. I'm writing a set up procedure for Mandriva 2007.1 which you can add to this page and I'll send it to you separately for inclusion.

Setup instructions for Mandriva 2007.1

1) Using the Mandriva control centre go to the Network & Internet section
and, create a new network profile for UOBWLAN.

2) Activate the UOBWLAN profile (this may temporarily hang the system if
you haven't copied a currently working profile).

3) Use the 'Set up a new network interface' function to set up a
wireless connection. When prompted, choose UOBWLAN from the list of
networks, or enter it manually if it hasn't been detected.

4) Choose WPA Pre-Shared Key as the encryption mode (I know this is wrong,
but the config interface doesn't support WPA-Enterprise yet, see note
below). Leave the encryption key blank and continue.

5) On the following screens make sure you set the interface to use
Automatic IP and to get the DNS servers from DHCP.

6) When prompted if you want to start the connection now, say no.

7) As root, open up /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file

You should find a section in the config file which looks like this :

  network={
     psk=""
     scan_ssid=1
     ssid="UOBWLAN"
  }

Delete this and replace it with Aaron's sample wpa_supplicant.conf,
available here,
making sure you put in your own username and password. If you want
you can add a second block at this point using the eduroam SSID, but
all other details the same. Alternatively, you can repeat these
steps if you would prefer eduroam to be configured as a separate
profile.

8) Save the changes and restart your network interface
('service network restart' if you are at the root command prompt).

9) It should now work. If it doesn't and you have a wireless card with the
atheros chipset/madwifi driver, then there is a bug in this driver which
prevents connection to WPA-Enterprise networks when using wireless g speeds.

This can be worked around by forcing the wireless card to downgrade to
wireless b speeds.

  a) Go back to the Mandriva control centre network section and click
     reconfigure a network interface.
  b) Ensure the wireless device is selected from the drop down box at the
     top (it should be ath0).
  c) Enter
        mode 11b
     into the 'iwpriv command extra arguments' box and apply.
  d) It should now work at the slower speed. Hopefully this bug will be
     fixed soon. The bug is described here http://madwifi.org/ticket/539

Note: Full support for WPA enterprise encryption in the Mandriva configuration
GUI is slated for the Mandriva 2008 release due in September 2007 (???),
so the manual editing of wpa_supplicant.conf shouldn't be necessary with this
release.

Installed 12 Jul 2007
Aaron Sloman
Using text provided by Tim Williams.