Tinkerboard wifi setup without Network Manager

[bulletim3]

Hello. Has anyone had success with setting up the onboard wifi on the Tinkerboard without the network manager?

 

I have tried using wpa_supplicant to connect but not having any success. Here is what (I know works on an Intel Compute Stick running Ubuntu 16.04) I've tried:

 

wpa_passphrase SSID password >> /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

wpa_supplicant -i wlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -D nl80211 -B

dhclient wlan0

 

dhclient just keeps retrying and goes no where, I don't get an IP address

 

I can connect to my network using the Network Manager no problems, just can't figure out a way to get it to work with the network manager disabled. The tinkerboard is running Armbian 5.41 Ubuntu Desktop Xenial 16.04.4.

 

Would appreciate if someone could provide specific instructions on how to get this to work or even just pointers/hints.

 

Thank you

 

[bulletim3]

Okay so I got it to work. It seems like the network manager was interfering somehow even though I had stopped and disabled the network manager. I used the following commands to do this:

 

$ sudo systemctl stop NetworkManager.service
$ sudo systemctl disable NetworkManager.service

 

So I uninstalled the network manager completely and then tried using wpa_supplicant again as posted in my post above, connected in first go, no issues!!

 

I then added the following code to /etc/networking/interfaces to bring the wifi interface up automatically at boot

 

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
pre-up wpa_supplicant -i wlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -D nl80211 -B
post-down killall -q wpa_supplicant

 

Have restarted a few times to test, seems to be working fine. Will update here if I notice any connectivity issues (which seems like a known issue with this boards wifi)

 

[TonyMac32]

2 minutes ago, bulletim3 said:

(which seems like a known issue with this boards wifi)

Yes, although I myself have never been able to aggravate it.  I've been trying to "diversify" my test methods, but it may be the link partner is partially responsible.  Maybe I should get a garbage AP and test against that, some $10 special. 

 

Mainline is using a particularly old version of the driver for one reason or another, Rockchip a newer one.

[chwe]

35 minutes ago, TonyMac32 said:

Maybe I should get a garbage AP and test against that, some $10 special. 

Just open a AP with your XR819 from the NanoPi duo.. That should be garbage enough...  

 

I never had wifi issues too.. try to get CSI to work from the couch and mostly to lazy to connect it to ETH.

 

45 minutes ago, bulletim3 said:

Okay so I got it to work. It seems like the network manager was interfering somehow even though I had stopped and disabled the network manager. I used the following commands to do this:

 

$ sudo systemctl stop NetworkManager.service
$ sudo systemctl disable NetworkManager.service

Maybe we should edit the docs? As far as I know, nmtui isn't standard on Ubuntu/Debian server (I think it is on Ubuntu desktop but I don't use linux desktops at all..  )

[bulletim3]

2 hours ago, chwe said:

Maybe we should edit the docs? As far as I know, nmtui isn't standard on Ubuntu/Debian server (I think it is on Ubuntu desktop but I don't use linux desktops at all..  )

 

 

Armbian 5.34 Tinkerboard Xenial server/headless includes network manager by default (I switched to the headless version soon after I resolved my wifi connection issue.), I had to remove it before setting up the wifi again. So probably don't need to document unless the nmtui is being removed sometime in the future?

 

[tkaiser]

1 hour ago, bulletim3 said:

Armbian 5.34 Tinkerboard Xenial server/headless includes network manager by default

 

This is default since almost 1.5 years now since NM is the only reasonable choice for inexperienced users to get Wi-Fi up and running in no time.

 

1 hour ago, bulletim3 said:

I had to remove it before setting up the wifi again. So probably don't need to document unless the nmtui is being removed sometime in the future?

 

It's not planned to remove nmtui and IMO there's also no need to document anything and especially NOT how to get rid of network-manager since this will be the first thing inexperienced users will do then just to struggle with all those outdated 'set up Wi-Fi on your Raspberry Pi by fiddling around in some text files' tutorials the Internet is flooded with  

 

If someone for whatever reasons wants to 'disable network manager' simply typing in these three words in either of the two search variants this site provides should be sufficient:

• Internal forum variant in the upper right corner: https://forum.armbian.com/search/?&q=disable network manager (as usual not that great results)
• 'Google site search' next to it: https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=disable+network+manager+site%3Aforum.armbian.com&oq=disable+network+manager+site%3Aforum.armbian.com (first hit explains everything)

[chwe]

6 hours ago, bulletim3 said:

Armbian 5.34 Tinkerboard Xenial server/headless includes network manager by default (I switched to the headless version soon after I resolved my wifi connection issue.)

okay, that wasn't mean in this way. I think x86 Debian/Ubuntu has networkmanager by default.

 

5 hours ago, tkaiser said:

It's not planned to remove nmtui and IMO there's also no need to document anything and especially NOT how to get rid of network-manager since this will be the first thing inexperienced users will do then just to struggle with all those outdated 'set up Wi-Fi on your Raspberry Pi by fiddling around in some text files' tutorials the Internet is flooded with  

Agree, I don't like archaic configurations by conf files cause nmtui does a decent job here. We don't need a tutorial how to disable nmtui but a small reminder:

nmtui doesn't allow configuration of wifi by modification of /etc/networking/interfaces. 

It's not the first time that this question came up and it might help to improve our docs cause this is not default in x86 world for debian/ubuntu. 

 

 

[tkaiser]

18 minutes ago, chwe said:

nmtui doesn't allow configuration of wifi by modification of /etc/networking/interfaces.

 

I think I don't understand... As far as I know NM isn't touching any interface that is defined in /etc/network/interfaces, right?

 

By default no wireless interface is referenced on any Armbian image in /etc/network/interfaces so nmtui simply will always work?

 

We ship with a bunch of different interface files, the default one containing commented wlan0 entries. But at least on some Wi-Fi equipped boards (not all for whatever reasons) this interfaces.default file will be replaced at first boot with the entirely empty interfaces.network-manager file so people can even read inside that they should stop fiddling around and use nmcli/nmtui instead.

 

So while I have to admit that our handling of /etc/network/interfaces* is somewhat brain-dead I still don't get your point... care to elaborate?

[Igor]

1 hour ago, tkaiser said:

We ship with a bunch of different interface files, the default one containing commented wlan0 entries.

 

Development branch https://github.com/armbian/build/tree/development/packages/bsp/common/etc/network is moving completely towards Network manager, 1st boot setup with it was successfully tested. Worked with wireless and ethernet, with normal and predicted interfaces. It can be further expanded to the hidden network connection ..., but problems are expected on Jessie due to an old version of NM.

 

The main problem with this topics issue is that wifi drivers for Tinker's onboard wifi are not in the best shape and if you want to use wpasuppliant to connect, you need to tell network manager to unmanage that particular wifi interface.

 

@bulletim3 Checking this part of the script might give you some clues.

[freak]

Getting rid of network manager looks to have solved maybe all of our wifi disconnection issues.  The network manager drops are apparently related to environments where multiple ap's are involved.  Like industrial, commercial, etc.  If you are sitting at home with a single wifi router you probably won't be able to replicate.  The article below talks about locking BSSID but we tried that and it does not help.  Disabling network manager helps tremendously.  sudo killall -STOP NetworkManger

 

"Regular network disconnects, latency and lost packets (WiFi)

NetworkManager does a scan every 2 minutes.

Some WiFi drivers have issues when scanning for base stations whilst connected/associated. Symptoms include VPN disconnects/reconnects and lost packets, web pages failing to load and then refresh fine."

 

"There is a patched version of NetworkManager which should prevent this type of scanning: networkmanager-noscanAUR"

 

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NetworkManager