Intel Pro Wireless 2100 Won't Associate to WPA AP

[MarkMSmith]

I'm running Ubuntu 8.10, with the 2.6.27-14-generic kernel. My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 8600 and I'm attempting to connect to my wireless network using the built-in Intel Pro Wireless 2100 card, but it refuses to associate to the access point.

The wireless network is correctly detected (along with others in the neighbourhood) by gnome-network-manager and when I select it I'm prompted for the WPA password. After clicking 'Connect' the system tray icon changes to two green dots with an animation for a short while before changing back to the two monitors with the warning icon and the message "Disconnected: The network connection has been disconnected".

I then right-click on the icon and choose 'edit connections' then edit the wireless connection that was automatically created, 'Auto SMITHHOME_WIRELESS', setting it to a static IP and pointing at the router for DNS, ie
Method: Manual
Addresses: 192.168.102.41, 255.255.255.0, 192.168.102.1
DNS Server: 192.168.102.1
After clicking 'OK' the tray icon very briefly animates and then it says "Connection Established: You are now connected to the wireless network 'SMITHHOME_WIRELESS'".

However, if I then try to ping the router I get Destination Host Unreachable and can't get any web pages.
The signal strength fluctuates between 95 and 100% but it no routes seem to go anywhere.

Very occassionally I manage to get it working for about 5 minutes if I unload and reload the ipw2100 driver, but it's seems more of a fluke than anything reliable.

The router is a Linksys BEFW11S4 set to channel 3 (2.427GHz) and has WPA TKIP encryption (Pre-shared key) with group key renewal set to 3600 seconds and MAC filtering but does broadcast its SSID. The wireless card works fine when I boot into the windows partition on the same laptop and I've confirmed the MAC being reported in linux matches the filter list, so I don't think there's anything wrong with the network setup.

Incidentally, the broadcom wired ethernet connection works fine in linux (and is what I'm using to file this bug report).

Looking at /var/log/wpa_supplicant.log it seems to say that the association request to the driver failed but then the next line says "Associated with <my router's MAC>". The sequence of lines is repeated again and again, with the log file constantly growing, like it's stuck in a loop.

I have the ipw2100 module loaded version 1.2.2, and it seems to be up to date with the latest one at the web site: http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/#downloads

Looking at dmesg the only error message around the wireless card seems to be "no IPv6 routers present", which I don't understand since I've tried disabling ipv6 in /etc/modprobe.d/aliases (see attached file).

The output of iwconfig reports an ever increasing number of "Invalid misc", if that's relevant.

I've also tried using Wicd (http://wicd.sourceforge.net/) instead of network-manager (0.7) since when I was trawling the forums a few people had found it fixed things for them, but since it didn't work any better for me I uninstalled it and reinstalled gnome-network-manager.

Since this wireless card is supposed to work according to the wiki page (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HardwareSupportComponentsWirelessNetworkCardsIntel), I thought I'd raise it as a bug.

To help debug, I've attached the outputs of dmesg, lsb_release -a, ifconfig, iwconfig, lshw -C network, lspci -vvnn, modinfo ipw2100, cat /proc/version_signature, /etc/modprobe.d/aliases and the repeating part of wpa_supplicant.log, hopefully that's sufficient :)

Since creating these logs I've taken a kernel update, going from 2.6.27-14.30 to 2.6.27-14.33 and installed the linux-backports-modules-intrepid package, but I still have the same problems.

I'd really appreciate any help with this, even if it just turns out I've done something stupid and misconfigured somehow.

Let me know if you need any further information.

- Mark

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue that you reported is one that should be reproducible with the live environment of the Desktop CD of the development release the Karmic Koala. It would help us greatly if you could test with it so we can work on getting it fixed in the next release of Ubuntu. You can find out more about the development release at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/ . Thanks again and we appreciate your help.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to New. Thanks again!.