OK, it is sort of solved, but I don't know what combination of incantations was crucial.
In the hope that it may help someone in the future here is a rough reconstruction of what I did, minus various futile attempts. I added PERSISTENT_DHCLIENT=yes to ifcfg-wlan0, commented out KEY_MGMT=WPA-PSK, and disabled security on the router. I also kept NM_CONTROLLED=no. I removed all the *.lease and *.leases files from /var/lib/dhclient. I restarted the computer. I kept watching /var/log/messages and iwevent in two terminals to see what was going on. This led to success - I connected. I concluded that the problem was related to WPA-PSK in one way or another. I reenabled WPA2/personal security on the router and set the PSK to a new value. I uncommented KEY_MGMT in ifcfg-wlan0 and modified WPA_PSK in keys-wlan0. This led to an interesting conclusion that despite all this iwevent still showed that wlan0 operated with "Encryption key: off" which I thought was weird (wpa_supplicant was running - I checked). As a result I saw in syslog that there were no DHCP offers and the thing evenually timed out (multiple times since I kept PERSISTENT_DHCLIENT=yes). I had a hunch that wpa_supplicant was somehow controlled by NetworkManager which, since I had disabled its control over wlan0, did not pick up the configuration change. This was a complete WAG (not the British variety - the American one - wild-assed guess), I really have no idea what I am talking about here - I could never figure out what the bloody NM did or did not do - its documentation is appaling/non-existent. Am I right that it is a GNOME thingy (I am a KDE user)? I re-enabled NM_CONTROLLED=yes in the hope that NM would somehow affect wpa_supplicant. It did - *somehow*, I don't understand exactly how - but now syslog got flooded with NM messages related to wpa_supplicant's state changing between "disconnected" and "scanning". Unfortunately, the link never got to a working state - NM kept issuing a "link timed out" warning. It was absolutely unclear to me what was going on (googling at various stages did not help) and on a hunch I went the "Microsoft way" and rebooted the computer once again (I do not know if just reloading iwlagn module would help as much). Lo and behold, I had wireless working after boot! So now I am basically back to the original configuration, with a different WPA_PSK and with PERSISTENT_DHCLIENT=yes, but I seriously doubt either of these changes is actually relevant. It didn't work until I rebooted, but I had rebooted more than once in the original configuration, too... It's got to be simpler. I consider myself to be fairly knowledgeable and experienced, but it took me quite a while and I still don't know what the problem was or what the fix was. Proudly sent through a wireless interface... -- Oleg Goldshmidt | p...@goldshmidt.org _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
