[pkg-wpa-devel] Bug#744158: Bug#744158: wpasupplicant: Interface cannot associate to SSID

[Stefan Lippers-Hollmann]

Control: severity -1 minor
Control: tags -1 moreinfo

On Thursday 10 April 2014, Daniele Giglio wrote:
> Package: wpasupplicant
> Version: 1.1-1
> Severity: grave
> Justification: renders package unusable
> 
> After an updare in the last days my wifi interface cannot associate to my
> access point any longer. I have tried to use wpa_cli and I've got the following
> result:

The wpasupplicant package was last updated on february 21st, so unless
you haven't upgraded your system for one and a half month [1], it's 
certainly not the wpasupplicant package which broke your ability to
connect to your wireless network. Besides that, "grave" is a heavily
inflated severity for this problem, unless you have a strong reason to 
believe that wpasupplicant is indeed broken for everyone and any 
imaginable purpose, not 'just' your own system (I realise that your
problem can be annoying enough, but it's far from grave). As a matter
of fact, wpasupplicant 1.1-1 is working fine on 33, mostly 
different[2], wlan cards on up to date unstable systems for me.

> <3>CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-RESULTS
> <3>Trying to associate with 00:0c:f6:a1:ba:98 (SSID='SitecomA1BA98' freq=2462
> MHz)
> <3>Association request to the driver failed

This looks like a kernel issue, probably specific to the iwlegacy 
driver for iwl3945. But the information you've presented so far isn't
comprehensive enough to make and educated guess.

> <3>Associated with 00:0c:f6:a1:ba:98
> <3>WPA: Key negotiation completed with 00:0c:f6:a1:ba:98 [PTK=CCMP GTK=CCMP]
> <3>CTRL-EVENT-CONNECTED - Connection to 00:0c:f6:a1:ba:98 completed (auth)
> [id=0 id_str=wifidhcp]

...and at this point it looks as if it had associated correctly, but
you're omitting eventual dmesg messages and the output of 
wpa_cli status here, so we don't know where it fails, at assoc, auth
or further up the stack when requesting an IP address.

> my lsmod returns:
> 
> iwl3945                58397  0
> iwlegacy               55017  1 iwl3945
> mac80211              450945  2 iwl3945,iwlegacy
> cfg80211              394809  3 iwl3945,iwlegacy,mac80211
> 
> the wifi and firmware installed packages are:
> 
> ii  firmware-iwlwifi                  0.41                  all

The firmware is up to date (although there haven't been any updates
for iwl3945  in years), so this is a good sign.

[...]
> Kernel: Linux 3.13-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
[...]

So kernel 3.13, I'm not aware of any known issues here either.

My gut feeling suggests that this is more likely a problem with your 
kernel (although iwlegacy is in deep maintenance mode, so there haven't
been many changes to its code recently) or a problem with your local
infrastructure (access point or wireless interference), but I have way
too little information to venture into reassigning to src:linux for 
now.

Please provide further information about your wlan configuration (you 
should use nl80211, not wext as driver type for wpa_supplicant; your
report doesn't suggest your setting), the required encryption type 
(unencrypted, the various WEP or WPA flavours), your complete dmesg
(at least the debugging information for your wlan card and its 
regulatory domain settings) and the output of "wpa_cli status" and 
what debugging information appears when you let wpa_cli running in 
interactive mode for a few minutes (e.g. if it goes into an auth/ 
deauth loop). It would also be tremenduously helpful if you could try
to find out what might have broken your previously working setup, by
checking which packages were installed/ upgraded in comparison to your
last known-working state (/var/log/{apt/,dpkg.log} should help here).
For testing, it probably won't hurt to restart your access point as 
well, as these can also freeze or hang.

Regards
	Stefan Lippers-Hollmann

[1]	and it's in testing for just a few days less
[2]	unfortunately none of them using the iwlegacy drivers
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