Failure to obtain IP with DHCP on Averatec laptop with rt2500

[Peter Belew]

Binary package hint: rt2500

I am unable to connect to an access point (AP) and obtain and IP on an Averatec 3200-series laptop with a built-in RaLink RA2500 wireless card. A file is attached with configuration information and logs.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

The attached file contains output from uname -a, lspci, lsmod, portion of /etc/network/interfaces, screen and log output while trying to obtain IP through DHCP (executing ifup ra0), cpu and interrupt information.

I am unable even to scan for APs with this card.

The RT2500 card works fine from Windows XP on the same computer (I am using it from XP right now). Also it was working on an earlier installation of Dapper and earlier Ubuntu, though I had some problems with the earlier Dapper installation and reinstalled Dapper from scratch, overwriting all but /home directories.

Sometimes when trying to bring it up keyboard input in X freezes, and I have to reboot.

There is probably a misconfiguration problem, or possibly the wrong rt2500 driver.

[Peter Belew (peterbe)]

A friend is having the same problem with an rt2500 in a slightly different model of Averatec laptop.

Also, I rebuilt the rt2500 driver from the source package, and there is no improvi]ement.

[Keffin Barnaby (keffinbarnaby)]

Same problem here, using a Linksys WMP54G (also rt2500) card in a desktop machine (AMD64, but using 32 bit edgy). The card works fine for me in Dapper with the following in my /etc/network/interfaces:

auto ra0
iface ra0 inet dhcp
pre-up iwconfig ra0 essid XXXXXXXXX
pre-up iwconfig ra0 mode managed
pre-up iwpriv ra0 set Channel=7
pre-up iwpriv ra0 set AuthMode=WPAPSK
pre-up iwpriv ra0 set EncrypType=AES
pre-up iwpriv ra0 set WPAPSK="YYYYYYYYYY"
pre-up iwpriv ra0 set TxRate=0

The following forum thread could be relevent:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=263668&highlight=ralink

I can reboot to provide more information if anything else would be useful.

[Keffin Barnaby (keffinbarnaby)]

Apparently it seems this bug was due to a transition in drivers for the realtek chipsets. I have just retried installing from a daily ISO today and my Dapper method works again.

[Keffin Barnaby (keffinbarnaby)]

Oops sorry replace realtek with RaLink in my above comment. My fingers were not typing what I told them to.

[Chris Wagner (chris-wagner)]

Hey, ya'll. I've just described my findings in bug 72202. Does that sound like the issues that you're seeing? What are the differences? There are about 4 or 5 bugs filed against rt2500 which can probably be deduced to about 2 bugs. Let's try to sort out the individual issues and report proper bugs for them.

[Michael R. Bernstein (webmaven)]

May be related to bug 48263

[Chris Wagner (chris-wagner)]

Ignore my above comment. My findings have been an inconsistent experience using the rt2500, so I've closed bug 72202. My rt2500-based card seems to be working ok right now...

[Fabián Rodríguez (magicfab)]

Rejecting as per last comment.

[Chris Wagner (chris-wagner)]

On Tue, 2007-03-20 at 23:36 +0000, Fabián Rodríguez wrote:
> Rejecting as per last comment.

You mean my comment? I wasn't even the one who reported this bug. I
was just trying to organize the bugs surrounding the rt2500 driver. It
might be best to reopen this... although, the rt2500 driver seems to
have many problems, so it's not clear whether all of the varied reports
are useful.

[tantris (tantris)]

I have the same problem! The bug is still there.

The original poster described the problem pretty accuratly:
"Failure to obtain IP with DHCP on Averatec laptop with rt2500"

This is not related to any "ra2500 not working" bug:

1. The module loads fine.
2. using wireless tools, one can see APs, essid, etc.
3. The problem occurs when trying to connect with DHCP
4. Removing the dhcp-pid for ra0 and using dhclient in a terminal gets a connection.

The problem is most likely somewhere in the interaction between dhcp, network manager, and ra2500.
I haven't yet tried to alias ra0 to wlan0.