WiFi Connection Issues

[Guest Mark OC]

Hi,

Had my Pulse for about a month now. First thing I did was to upgrade to 1.7. Was working great no probs....thanks Paul and everyone for the effort.

Recently I have been unable to connect to WiFi networks. The sequence of events is always as follows:

• Turn on wif
  
• Phone shows scanning
  
• previously connected networks are detected
  
• I will just leave to connect or click connect
  
• status will change to scanning again
  
• status changes to disconnected and networks are no longer detected; then start again from number 2
  

Has anyone seen anything like this? The wifi had been working fine but this issue seemed to be caused when I was sending a message and the phone was rotated. It became unresponsive and then it rebooted to show the normal Android boot screen. Since then no wi-fi connection.

Seems very strange; you would think if the wifi had packed it it would not even find the network.

Any help would be great. Installed 2.1 tonight hoping it would fix the issue but no luck at all.

Cheers,

Mark

[Guest Mark OC]

I was having another think about this last night and basically I thought it must have been something to do with the SD card since applying the Hungarian update would fully reset the phone part not reset was the SD card. However I reformatted the SD card this morning (512MB ext2 and rest of 2GB FAT32) but still same issue.

Is it a correct that the Hungarian update will totally reset the phone? Does the Hungarian update flash new firmware? Would there be any other steps I could take to totally reset the phone?

So far I've applied the Hungarian update, reformatted SD drive and used all wipe options from custom recovery image. The only think I can think of now is to reflash the firmware.

[Guest Mark OC]

Been gettin used to adb over the last few days and for the life of me can't see any issues with the wifi. The wpa_supplicant seems to be running fine:

# ps w | grep wpa

 2839 0		 2072 S	/system/bin/wpa_supplicant -Dwext -ieth0 -W -c/data/misc/wifi/wpa_supplicant.conf

And the conf file looks fine too:

# cat /data/misc/wifi/wpa_supplicant.conf

ctrl_interface=DIR=/data/misc/wpa_supplicant GROUP=system

update_config=1


network={

	ssid="TreeTops"

	psk="password"

	priority=1

}

Does this look ok for connecting to wifi with the Pulse to anyone that knows a little bit more about it?

I'm pretty familiar with linux but can't seem to see where the wifi service script is. I want to change the wpa_supplicant command line to add a few -d's to it to get some debug and to put the log somewhere where I can look at it. Anyone know where the service/init scripts live on android; not too much in the usual linux /etc/init.d

Anyone any ideas here? I've tried an alternative wifi manager (Wefi) but it just says failed to connect.

So strange that this connected before and now will not connect at all; no matter how many resets, enable/disable, reinstall rom etc etc etc I do. Won't connect to any wifi but will find them all.

Thanks,

Mark

[Guest Stevos]

/init.rc has a load of references to /data/misc for the wifi stuff, not sure if that's what you're looking for.

/data/misc/wifi

/data/misc/wifi/sockets

/data/misc/wpa_supplicant

/data/misc/dhcp

There seems to be a wpa_supplicant.conf in /data/misc/wifi

edit: doh, you already found that, sorry

Edited May 31, 2010 by Stevos

[Guest Stevos]

Just noticed my wpa_supplicant.cong file has a couple more entries, I'm not sure if they are important. Sorry it's ages since I configured linux networking.

ctrl_interface=DIR=/data/misc/wpa_supplicant

GROUP=system

update_config=1

network={

ssid="BLAHBLAHBLAH"

psk="BLAHBLAHBLAH"

}

Edited May 31, 2010 by Stevos

[Guest Stevos]

Anyone any ideas here? I've tried an alternative wifi manager (Wefi) but it just says failed to connect.

So strange that this connected before and now will not connect at all; no matter how many resets, enable/disable, reinstall rom etc etc etc I do. Won't connect to any wifi but will find them all.

Last two stupid ideas from me

1) there seems to be another "baseline" wpa_supplicant.conf in /etc/wifi Might be worth making sure you haven't got anything strange in there from your alternative wifi manager.

2) Last time I had a problem connecting to a network that showed up, I realised that it was me typing my WPA key in as lower case as I'd got used to WEP keys being hex and obviously case insensitive. I swore a bit. Embarassing but there you go. WPA keys are case sensitive of course, and the asterisks when you type one in don't help.

Hope you get it sorted anyway.

[Guest Tom G]

Start with the basics.

Are iwconfig and iwlist included in the rom? If not, compile them or find some arm binaries and push them to the phone.

Turn off wifi in android and try to manually configure a connection through the shell.

Should be something like

insmod /system/wifi/ar6000.ko

iwlist eth0 scanning					 <--- Try to find networks

iwconfig eth0 essid 'some ap'	   <--- Configure network to listen too

ifconfig eth0 XX.XX.XX.XX		   <--- IP address goes here

ping ....					<--- Ping the IP of the AP

Try it on a network without WPA first. Once you have tested a basic connection you can add wpa, dhcp etc until you find whats causing the problem.

Edited June 1, 2010 by Tom G

[Guest Mark OC]

Thanks for the responses guys.

Can you tell me how to compile for Android? I have the source for the iwlist etc but how do I compile this on my linux machine so that it can be pushed using adb and then ran on the phone?

I am not familiar with Android development at all although have used gcc/make etc. make in the directory of the source will compile iwlist but when I push this to phone it does not run.

I am just building it statically; I assume it does not run due to kernel mismatch etc. Googleing does not give any quick answers....do I need the SDK?

Thanks,

Mark

[Guest Tom G]

Thanks for the responses guys.

Can you tell me how to compile for Android? I have the source for the iwlist etc but how do I compile this on my linux machine so that it can be pushed using adb and then ran on the phone?

I am not familiar with Android development at all although have used gcc/make etc. make in the directory of the source will compile iwlist but when I push this to phone it does not run.

I am just building it statically; I assume it does not run due to kernel mismatch etc. Googleing does not give any quick answers....do I need the SDK?

Thanks,

Mark

You need to compile it for arm architecture, so you need a cross compiler. If you get the android source from git it will include a few versions of gcc in the prebuilt packages, or you can find another source of a cross compiler. Code Sourcery have some. How you build the programs varies a bit with different make scripts, but statically linked is good.

I just checked the RedBull rom and Huawei have included iwconfig and iwlist in that so they are probably already in the T-mob rom as well.

/system/wifi/iwlist

/system/wifi/iwconfig

Attached are the binaries from the RBM (Swiss) rom.

wifi.zip