[pkg-wpa-devel] Bug#431657: automatic wlan connection at bootprocess on Etch only on second try

[Kel Modderman]

On Sun, 5 Aug 2007 05:28:56 am Jurij Smakov wrote:
> reassign 431657 wpasupplicant
> thanks
>
> On Sat, Aug 04, 2007 at 07:52:46PM +0200, Michael Lansche wrote:
> > Hi Jurij,
> >
> > Am Freitag, 3. August 2007 23:21 schrieb Jurij Smakov:
> > > Ok, that looks pretty regular. Another thing I can suggest is to try
> > > to add a delay (like 'sleep 5') to the start/pre-up branch in the
> > > /etc/wpa_supplicant/ifupdown.sh, right after conf_wpa_supplicant line.
> > > That delay should give the WPA authentication some time to settle
> > > before the dhclient is invoked to obtain an DHCP lease. Let me know if
> > > it helps.
>
> [...]
>
> > your suggestion works.
> >
> > I think this way the boot process is a few seconds slower than with my
> > workaround.
> >
> > Nevertheless I'd like to ask which is now the better respectively the
> > more Debian-like way?
> >
> > Is it now a bug or only a specific problem of my hardware?
>
> I'm not too familiar with wpasupplicant, so I'm going to reassign the
> bug.
>
> wpasupplicant folks: it looks like under some circumstances
> wpasupplicant exits too soon, so the first attempt to obtain DHCP
> lease fails. I've asked Michael to add a delay to
> /etc/wpa_supplicant/ifupdown.sh and it fixed his problem. Please have
> a look at it and advise.

Adding the 5 second sleep after invoking wpa_supplicant seems weird to me.

Perhaps the drivers mentioned in this bug thread do not cope well with 
allowing wpa_supplicant to start and then have dhclient start immediately 
afterwards before being in associated state.

The current behaviour (for the shown configuration) is to ignore state of 
interface, have wpa_supplicant and dhclient start and when association 
happens some short time later dhclient succeeds and the network connection 
gets established.

Another possibility is that wpa_supplicant somehow exits after first 
invocation, that has not been confirmed in this report though. Even though 
the interface failed to come up on boot there should still be a 
wpa_supplicant process running, check it with 'ps aux | grep wpa_sup'.

If it is still running, check its status with 'wpa_cli status'.

Thanks, Kel.