How should I troubleshoot a problematic wireless connection on Linux?

2

I recently purchased a netgear 150 usb wireless dongle for use with my 11.10 Xubuntu amd64 system. Using the network-manager interface, I can see local wireless networks and enter the authentication details for my local wireless lan. Unfortunately, the connection does not seem to work, I keep getting notifications that my wireless has disconnected (but none indicating that I've connected). When I examine syslog, it seems to indicate that I've successfully associated with the wireless switch and that dhcp has successfully acquired an ip address but the log shows that the dhcp process keeps sending requests, eventually dropping the connection. 'ifconfig wlan0' never shows the dhcp address logged in syslog.

I suspect that the problem lies with the usb dongle, my configuration or the wireless switch but I am not certain how to isolate the problem, can anyone provide some insight on how I should go about homing in on the cause of this problem or verifying the functionality of the individual components, thanks.

Gearoid Murphy

Posted 2012-04-12T10:25:50.333

Reputation: 687

2I suspect this will be hard to diagnose without more context. Perhaps you could provide a snippet of the syslog entries aournd where the DHCP is failing? – Keith – 2012-04-12T11:12:21.400

Also, what router do you have? It's very seldom (only heard about it) but possible that the Dongle and the Router do not work nice together. – Bobby – 2012-04-12T11:14:16.217

Good points, I'll update my question when I'm home. – Gearoid Murphy – 2012-04-12T12:22:28.360

Answers

0

According to this thread the dongle you bought is not natively supported and requires the ath9k drivers. Though, that might be outdated information by now.

Have a look at the ath9k graphical installer. I think should help.

If that doesn't help please give us the output of nm-tool.

phw

Posted 2012-04-12T10:25:50.333

Reputation: 510

I was my router :-|, after rebooting the wireless switch, it worked fine, thanks for the info though. – Gearoid Murphy – 2012-04-15T19:41:50.317