Arch Linux

Description:

Netcfg2 fails to associate my atheros card with a WEP access point; though WPA works fine. This happens every single time. The ESSID is correctly set by netcfg2, as reported by iwconfig, but the status stays at "not associated". It should be noted that netcfg2 doesn't complain about not associating, but merely fails silently.

My own research has shown that this atheros (madwifi) card does not seem to like netcfg2 calling iwconfig while the interface is still up. I have patched my copy of netcfg to bring the interface down before calling iwconfig in the WEP part. I have attached this modification as a unified diff to "/usr/lib/network/wireless.subr". After applying this simple modification, netcfg2 successfully associates with the WEP access point.

I would suggest, however, that the correct modification would be to always make sure that the interface is brought down at the start of wireless_up(), and only brought up again after iwconfig has been called for the last time. (i.e. configure first, then association will begin when the interface is brought up)


Additional info:

Output of lspci:
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212/AR5213 Multiprotocol MAC/baseband processor (rev 01)

Netcfg2 profile:
CONNECTION="wireless"
INTERFACE=ath0
SCAN="yes"
SECURITY="wep"
ESSID="[removed]"
KEY="[removed]"
IP="dhcp"
TIMEOUT=30