ath5k fails to connect to WPA-PSK secured AP on AR5001X+ in HP nc8000 laptop running lucid 10.04

[Logan Dam]

The laptop has a mini-pci card that has an ar5212 chipset, which is reported to work with ath5k.

As the attached part of kern.log shows, it authenticates, associates, then immediately deauthenticates by itself. This process loops until it asks me for the passphrase again (which is a 12 digit hex key). Then it starts looping this again until eventually it gives up.

This happens using kernel 2.6.32, 2.6.33 and 2.6.38 from the ubuntu kernel ppa. It also happens using compat-wireless-2.6.39-1 and compat-wireless-3.1-1rc1. madwifi 0.9.4 works perfectly first time.

What I have tried:
Disable security on AP -> connects fine.
Compile kernel from source -> same problem.
Uninstall network-manager and use wicd -> same problem.
Configure wpa_supplicant.conf -> same problem.
Compile wpa_supplicant from source -> same problem.
Use ubuntu 10.10 -> kernel panics and complete hard lockups, wireless still did not work when the entire system didn't crash.

At the moment I'm running 2.6.38-10-generic 32bit.

Aircrack-ng is installed and putting the card in monitor mode using airmon-ng works fine and can capture traffic well.

[Logan Dam (dam-loganza)]

This week I installed Arch on this laptop and the problem still occurs, so this is not an Ubuntu bug. Using wpa_supplicant directly leaves me with a blinking terminal cursor and nothing happens. iwconfig shows that the card is running in the 5GHz band instead of the 2.4GHz band that my AP is in, and any attempt to change the channel or frequency via iwconfig does not work.

[Logan Dam (dam-loganza)]

I've now come across something new: I read a thread regarding ar2413 chips and how they need nohwcrypt as a parameter when loading ath5k, so I gave that a shot. So far my endeavor hasn't worked, because I've now discovered that after TRYING to put the wlan0 interface up with ifconfig wlan0 up, the wireless card gets hard blocked. Let me summarise:

logan@linuxbox:~$ sudo modprobe ath5k
logan@linuxbox:~$ rfkill list all
3: phy0: Wireless LAN
 Soft blocked: no
 Hard blocked: no
logan@linuxbox:~$ sudo ifconfig wlan0 up
SIOCSIFFLAGS: Unknown error 132
logan@linuxbox:~$ rfkill list all
3: phy0: Wireless LAN
 Soft blocked: no
 Hard blocked: yes
logan@linuxbox:~$

Why on earth would simply putting the interface up cause a HARD block? The only "hard" block I have on this laptop is a wireless button that I'm fairly sure does nothing on any distro of linux, except toggle bluetooth. Pressing it does nothing to get rid of the hard block, nor does it create a hard block before trying to put the interface up. Anybody got any ideas? Should I take this to the compat-wireless bugzilla?

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Logan Dam, thank you for reporting this and helping make Ubuntu better. This bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? Can you try with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO CD images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/ .

If it remains an issue, could you run the following command from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal). It will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report.

apport-collect -p linux <replace-with-bug-number>

Also, if you could test the latest upstream kernel available that would be great. It will allow additional upstream developers to examine the issue. Refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds . Once you've tested the upstream kernel, please remove the 'needs-upstream-testing' tag. This can be done by clicking on the yellow pencil icon next to the tag located at the bottom of the bug description and deleting the 'needs-upstream-testing' text. Please let us know your results.

Thanks in advance.