Bug 449215

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User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b5) Gecko/2008043010 Fedora/3.0-0.60.beta5.fc9 Firefox/3.0b5

Description of problem:
This problem happens most often when the connection quality is poor. 
The initial connection (e.g. from login to an account, after stopping and restarting both NetworkManager AND wpa_supplicant, etc.) is usually OK. After the wireless network looses connection, NetworkManager is often unable to reconnect.
Kernel module used: ipw2200.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
NetworkManager-0.7.0-0.9.3.svn3623.fc9.i386 wpa_supplicant-0.6.3-5.fc9.i386

How reproducible:
Sometimes


Steps to Reproduce:
1. Establish a connection to a faraway access point, using WPA-PEAP.
2. Let it disconnect. For some reason, re-starting nm-applet produces the same effect - can be used to debug the problem without much wait.

Actual Results:
10% of the time, connection re-establishes normally.

There are 3 scenarios of reconnection failure:

1. wpa_supplicant doesn't even try to associate with an access point. wpa_supplicant.log only contains the lines

CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-RESULTS 
CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-RESULTS 
CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-RESULTS 
CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-RESULTS 
CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-RESULTS 
CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-RESULTS 
...

Applet GUI shows 'connection in progress spinner', but supplicant seems idle. No GUI action (clicking "Connect" in a dialog asking to re-enter credentials, selecting the proper SSID from nm-applet menu) changes the situation.

To work-around this problem, the following command must be executed as root:
$ iwconfig eth1 essid <ESSID> key 0

After that, the supplicant starts to associate, and can even establish a connection, but more likely one of the other two scenarios happens.

2. Association/connection times out. NetworkManager has a very short connection timeout (20-30 seconds or so), which is too short to establish a connection over a poor link in some cases. This might also be a wpa_supplicant or kernel module issue. Restarting wpa_supplicant usually helps.

3. Authentication fails. Once it failed once, re-trying the connection always fails. The workaround is to restart both wpa_supplicant and NetworkManager daemons (applet can keep running), OR uncheck "Enable Networking" box in applet menu, then check it back again.

Expected Results:
NM should be able to reconnect with the same pass/fail ratio as initial connection. Connection timeout should be either longer by default, or configurable. Ideally, NM shouldn't even ask for credentials to re-attempt failed connection (see bug 447620), only giving a warning status to the user.

Additional info:
It seems that wpa_supplicant state machine and NM state machine are becoming out of sync. One hint at this is that ESSID is lost - looks like wpa_supplicant drops ESSID, while NM thinks that ESSID has already been sent and doesn't re-send it.
Sections of wpa_supplicant.log and NM debug printouts for good and bad conditions will be attached.