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13

Need to restart network interfaces and kill wpa_supplicant, how to fix?

rated 0 times [ 13] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 36031 / 3 Years ago, sat, june 26, 2021, 12:24:29

My workplace uses 802.11x authentication for their WiFi network, and several times per day I get booted from the network and need to do the following:

Disable networking

sudo kill -9

Restart networking

At this point, the machine will connect to the network just fine. I don't see any weirdness in the syslog, and am running Ubuntu 12.04 (64-bit). What could be wrong?

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izecaptur

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3 Years ago

answered 3 Years ago nquirewha · Accepted Answer

I had the same problem. It turns out that Network manager is a little overzealous in switching between access points (AP's) when more than one are present. You have two options

Use iwlist to find out how many AP's are there:

root@debian:/home/nofrills# iwlist wlan0 scan



Scan completed :

  Cell 01 - Address: 00:1E:58:A1:41:87

            ESSID:"iiserk_wireless"

            Mode:Managed

            Frequency:2.462 GHz (Channel 11)

            Quality:4/5  Signal level:-64 dBm  Noise level:-92 dBm

            IE: IEEE 802.11i/WPA2 Version 1

                Group Cipher : TKIP

                Pairwise Ciphers (2) : TKIP CCMP

                Authentication Suites (1) : 802.1x

               Preauthentication Supported

            Encryption key:on

            Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 6 Mb/s

                      12 Mb/s; 24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s

                      48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s



  Cell 02 - Address: 00:1E:58:A1:54:7B

            ESSID:"iiserk_wireless"

            #More such details

Then note the Address of the cell with the highest Quality. That is the AP nearest to you. Then click on Network manager applet, select "Edit Connections" and go to the wifi network listed. There will be a text box titled "BSSID". Paste the Cell address there.

Otherwise, you can ditch network manager altogether and use wpa_supplicant (Network manager uses it under the hood anyway). Just create a configuration file and edit your /etc/network/interfaces this way:
```
auto lo

iface lo inet loopback



auto wlan0

iface wlan0 inet dhcp

    pre-up wpa_supplicant -B -Dwext -i wlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

    post-down killall -q wpa_supplicant 
```

Option 1 is not very useful unless you spend most of your time at workplace in roughly the same location. Option 2 is what I am using now, and it works pretty well. But wifi does not get automatically reconnected after suspend/resume, so you need to run /etc/init.d/networking/restart manually.

If you like doing things neatly, as an alternative to the generic killall command, you can use the WPA specific tool wpa_client:

wpa_cli -i wlan0 terminate