Wobbly Wi-Fi
I am trying, and failing, to connect to an unencrypted wireless network with wpa_supplicant on Ubuntu 15.04 on a Dell laptop. I have also tried a network with WEP encryption and that does work. This is my wpa_supplicant.conf: ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant network={ ssid="XXXX” key_mgmt=NONE } network={ ssid="YYYY” key_mgmt=WEP wep_key0 = “abcde” } When I try to connect to the open network, my log fills with entries like this: new0: CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-STARTED new0: SME: Trying to authenticate with aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff (SSID='XXXX’ freq=2432 MHz) new0: SME: Authentication request to the driver failed Henry Alexander This looks like a driver issue, but you don’t say which wireless card or driver you are using. Try adding auth_ alg=OPEN after the key_mgmt line. This should not be strictly necessary, but some drivers need all the help they can get. If this still fails, I would look at the driver you’re using, particularly if you have a Broadcom card, as many Dells do.
Broadcom cards generally try to use the b43 driver from the kernel, which doesn’t work correctly with all of the Broadcom 43XX chipsets. The solution is to use Broadcom’s own driver by installing the broadcom-stacommon package. Once installed, you need to disable the b43 driver by adding these lines to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf – create the file if it doesn’t exist: blacklist ssb blacklist bcma blacklist b43 blacklist brcmsmac
Then either rmmod the old modules and modprobe the new one (it’s called wl, despite the name of the package) or just reboot to apply the changes.
If you are not using a Broadcom card (and they seem to be the ones causing these sorts of problems) you may get more information from dmesg or the system log. As the interface you are trying to configure is called new0 (are you trying to do something clever with virtual interfaces?), it may help if you try running this command before trying to connect and watching the output:
$ journalctl --follow | grep new0