Ubuntu 9.04 Cannot Connect to visible open wifi ap (reason 6)

Question

I'm travelling currently so the last network i connected successfully to was my home wpa-psk network. I hadn't tried anything until i got to my accommodation that is an open network (that I'm on now on the Win7 partition on my laptop).

The network (and a similar archetypical 'linksys' open network, aswell as some protected local networks are correctly displayed in network-manager and upon selection, it happily spins around to its hearts content for a while before saying 'no chance boy'.

/var/log/syslog spills out the usual combination of wpa_supplicant and kernel messages, the most interesting of are that the kernel deauthentication reason 6 response. 6 apparently means class2FrameFromNonAuthStation...Client attempted to transfer data before it was authenticated.

Anyone seen anything like this? I've already tried going closer to the router to no avail. I don't remember seeing this any other time I've connected to a open AP, even if that AP is far away. (Signal strength for this AP is good, kismet says its around -57dBm, well above the threshold of -80dBm, and I've tried all the suggestions from the 'Related Questions'

UPDATE

Windows Logs all confirm that:

Authentication: Open
Encryption: None
FIPS Mode: Disabled
802.1x Enabled: No

Ubuntu Logs say that:

Jul  1 01:58:02 ubuntu kernel: [  227.196099] wlan0: direct probe to AP 00:1b:2f:fe:83:2e try 1
Jul  1 01:58:02 ubuntu kernel: [  227.396092] wlan0: direct probe to AP 00:1b:2f:fe:83:2e try 2
Jul  1 01:58:02 ubuntu kernel: [  227.398915] wlan0 direct probe responded
Jul  1 01:58:02 ubuntu kernel: [  227.398920] wlan0: authenticate with AP 00:1b:2f:fe:83:2e
Jul  1 01:58:02 ubuntu kernel: [  227.596117] wlan0: authenticate with AP 00:1b:2f:fe:83:2e
Jul  1 01:58:02 ubuntu kernel: [  227.597930] wlan0: authenticated
Jul  1 01:58:02 ubuntu kernel: [  227.597936] wlan0: associate with AP 00:1b:2f:fe:83:2e
Jul  1 01:58:03 ubuntu wpa_supplicant[1307]: CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED - Disconnect event - remove keys
Jul  1 01:58:03 ubuntu wpa_supplicant[1307]: last message repeated 2 times
Jul  1 01:58:03 ubuntu kernel: [  227.796131] wlan0: associate with AP 00:1b:2f:fe:83:2e
Jul  1 01:58:03 ubuntu kernel: [  227.798123] wlan0: deauthenticated (Reason: 6)
Jul  1 01:58:03 ubuntu wpa_supplicant[1307]: CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED - Disconnect event - remove keys
Jul  1 01:58:04 ubuntu wpa_supplicant[1307]: last message repeated 2 times

Over and over again in various combination.

Answer 1

Just to clarify, your laptop received something like

wlan0: RX deauthentication from <bssid> (reason=6)

which means the AP is telling your laptop it received a class 2 frame from the laptop while the laptop wasn't (it thinks) authenticated, and telling it to deassociate.

Here is another way to put it, and an explanation what a class 2 frame is

class 2 frame received (6) - device received "class 2" frame (association/reassociation management frame) before completing 802.11 authentication process;

It would be interesting to compare your kernel and wpa_supplicant logs to those from either the router or your win7 partition. Here is how to gather a wireless trace from vista.

If you want an uncluttered trace from ubuntu, you can use iw:

sudo iw event -t -f

Answer 2

Turns out that using the compat-wireless drivers fixes this.