Beaglebone wifi unable to acquire IP address

[mingy]

Hi,

I purchased the mini wifi adapter (http://www.adafruit.com/products/814) and followed the instructions.
I am able to see the dmesg showing the hardware got detected and network interface wlan0, but after creating the wifi config file at /var/lib/connman/wifi.config and restarting connman.
The wlan0 is unable to acquire an IP address. I tried changing my wifi security from WEP to WPA2 Personal but still no avail.
Anyone had the same experience and has any idea how to handle this issue?

Thanks a lot!

[mingy]

BTW, what value should I set for Security if I am using WPA2 Personal?
My /var/lib/connman/wifi.config looks like this:

[service_home]
Type = wifi
Name = my_wifi_name
Security = wpa
Passphrase = my_wifi_password
(newline)

[adafruit]

do you see anything with iwlist?

[mingy]

I downloaded the rev6 image and followed the configuration instruction again.

Here is the status:

1. after rebooting the first time, dmesg did not show the "rtl8192cu..." message. It showed up after the 2nd reboot by pressing the reset button.
2. In the 2nd reboot, ifconfig hung the system, after a while it printed out: "task wpa_supplicant:309 blocked for more than 120 seconds."
3. I have to press the reset button to reboot when the system hung. After rebooting, dmesg no longer show "rtl8192cu..." anymore

Any advice?

[adafruit]

not sure what's up - this chipset is supposed to be supported. can you try posting on the bone google group?

[mingy]

just wondering, are you able to make the wifi adapter work by the instruction you provided?
thai is, get the rev6 image, opkg upgrade, install firmware, reboot, set up wifi credentials, acquire IP address.
If it works for you, can you create an Image out of the working system and share it? This way everyone can use it as a benchmark to test. I would really appreciate it.

[adafruit]

we havent tried it with rev6 but we did get it working great with A4 and A5 from what we recall

[mingy]

Do you mind testing it out with rev6? It seems that many people are having similar problem with it.
I will try rev5 also. Thanks a lot!

[mingy]

Finally I got it working with ubuntu 12.10. Here is what I have tried:

1. Installed rev5 image. Couldn't do opkg update. Got lots of errors saying invalid URL.

2. Installed rev6 image without opkg upgrade since I suspect there might be some recent changes that may break the wifi connectivity. It looks better at the beginning, I was able to get the wifi dongle recognized, also make wlan0 interface available. However it was never able to acquire an IP address, iwlist scan also returned nothing.

3. Installed ubuntu 12.10 image from http://rcn-ee.net/deb/rootfs/quantal/ubuntu-12.10-r2-minimal-armhf-2012-11-29.tar.xz and replace the wifi dongle with Linksys WUSB100. Compared to Angstrom, Ubuntu seems to be much stable. Configuring wifi tooks a lot less effort. The dongle worked right out of box and with minimal set up (ifconfig, ifup, ..., etc). It was able to acquire an IP address fairly quickly.

Hopefully this can help someone who's like me struggling to get wifi working on the beaglebone.

Thanks.

[captain_juno]

Thanks for the updates, mingy. I'm having the same problem without any luck with the same rev and wifi module on Angstrom. I would like to try to use Ubuntu since I'm more used to Debian-based operating systems and I'm really not liking connman. But, when you said that you replaced the module, does that mean that you are not using the original wifi module with Ubuntu? I've read a couple things that makes me think Ubuntu doesn't support that chipset very well.

[mingy]

Hi Captain, that is correct. I was unable to get the mini wifi dongle working with ubuntu either. I guess I have to install the firmware. The Linksys one works out of the box pretty well. The only downside is it's much bigger than the mini dongle.

[captain_juno]

If it helps, this is what I've found out so far:
Ubuntu can tell that it's an rtl8192cu chipset as seen in dmesg. I added the wlan0 interface in /etc/network/interfaces and added the module to /etc/modules so that it's loaded at boot.. I was able to run sudo modprobe rtl8192cu but this didn't seem to do anything for me. Even after some reboots. But, this Ubuntu question/answers seems to point out that we might need to download the driver from Realtek, cross-compile it, and replace the module that comes with Ubuntu with the new one. Once I figure that out, I'll post back. Also, if you haven't noticed, there's a similar discussion here.

[elfpen]

I also am struggling with the wifi configuration.

I set up my wifi.config file in /var/lib/connman.
The boot process creates a /var/lib/connman/wifi<blah><blah>_psk directory
and dmesg shows the device is found. But it tries about 4 times to
connect and eventually gives up. In the ..._psk directory there is
a file called settings. Cat of settings shows that the security key phrase
did not work. I have tried all sorts of combinations of security types
and various phrases between my Bone and the wifi router. Nothing
seems to help. /usr/lib/connman/test/get-services shows
that I have a 55% signal.

I did have it working a bit when I was sitting right next to the router,
or maybe I dreamed it. In the next room it has never worked.

I see that there are much newer versions of connman (1.11 vs 0.79?)
I think I will try to figure out how to get a newer version of connman.

It would help a lot if I had some running debug info from connman
to show me what is going wrong.

One more thing, googling for other help with this I discovered early
that you cannot run wifi and wired ethernet at the same time.
That's a bummer.

Overall, not a good experience so far. Maybe I will end up dumping Angstrom too.

[elfpen]

Update -- misspoke about using wired and wifi at the same time.

I am using wired ethernet right now but having the same experience with wifi
it associates/disassociates a few times then gives up with the
Failure=invalid-key in the /var/lib/connman/*_psk/settings file.

[captain_juno]

Got it to work! I followed a guide from this post.