NWAM Phase 0 Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting Network problems

1. Is NWAM enabled?
    To determine if NWAM is running, run:

# svcs physical

 If NWAM is running, you should see:

STATE          STIME    FMRI
disabled       15:18:18 svc:/network/physical:default
online         16:44:23 svc:/network/physical:nwam

 If you see

STATE        STIME    FMRI
online       15:18:18 svc:/network/physical:default
disabled     16:44:23 svc:/network/physical:nwam

 NWAM is not enabled, so doing the following will fix this:

# svcadm disable network/physical:default
# svcadm enable network/physical:nwam

1. Driver problems?
    To determine if drivers have attached successfully for your network devices, run:

# ifconfig -a

 If you see only

lo0: flags=2001000849 mtu 8232 index 1
        inet 127.0.0.1 netmask ff000000 
lo0: flags=2002000849 mtu 8252 index 1
        inet6 ::1/128 

 you likely need drivers or need to update /etc/driver_aliases for the devices you have. The laptop community is a great resource for troubleshooting these sorts of issues.

1. Wireless problems
    First, ensure that your wireless device is present:

# dladm show-link

 Now to determine if the wireless device can see any WLANs, run

# dladm scan-wifi

 If the scan is picking up WLANs, we know wireless is working, so there may be an NWAM-specific problem.

1. Wireless/WEP/DHCP problems
    Because of the way authentication works with WEP, there is no definitive indication of keying problems: if an incorrect key is given, the connection to the AP will succeed, but packets will not move. From the perspective of the nwam daemon, the connect operation succeeds, and then DHCP is started, but never acquires a lease. Since the DHCP protocol does not have a time limit, the DHCP client will continue to try to connect; in this case, there is no protocol-defined way to distinguish between an authentication failure and a missing/slow DHCP server.
    If you suspect you might be running into this problem, confirm that you are connected:

# dladm show-wifi
LINK       STATUS            ESSID               SEC    STRENGTH   MODE   SPEED
wpi0       connected         foo                 wep    good       g      36Mb

 ...and that there are no responses coming from the DHCP server:

# ifconfig wpi0 dhcp status
Interface  State         Sent  Recv  Declined  Flags
wpi0       SELECTING        5     0         0  

 To recover, you must delete the incorrect key, and restart the nwam service. It will then walk you through the process of choosing a WLAN and entering the key again.
 Use the dladm command to delete the incorrect key. The name of the key will be in the format "nwam-<essid>-<bssid>". You can use dladm to see the names of all stored keys, as well:

# dladm show-secobj
OBJECT               CLASS
nwam-foo-0.11.24.b.84.b1 wep
nwam-bar-12.17.a6.c0.c5.0 wep
# dladm delete-secobj nwam-foo-0.11.24.b.84.b1
#

 After deleting the incorrect key, restart the nwam service:

# svcadm restart nwam

1. Wired/wireless preferences and static addressing
    By default, NWAM prefers, and will first try to configure, plugged in wired interfaces. If this fails, it will fall back to wireless. In cases where drivers do not support notifications of plugging/unplugging, NWAM may erroneously assume the wired devices are plugged in. If you wish to change the order of device configuration, edit the /etc/nwam/llp file. it should look like this:

wired_if0 dhcp
..
wireless_if0 dhcp

 Changing the order is easy, just move the wireless_if0 entry/entries above the wired. If you wish to assign a static address, replace "dhcp" with "static", followed by the static address and an optional prefix length, e.g. "static 192.168.1.4/24".

1. None of the above
    If NWAM appears to be finding all your interfaces and attempting to bring the up, but you still don't have the expected network connectivity, it's often useful to know how far NWAM got in its attempt to bring things up. Some helpful things to check are:
   1* The output of 'ifconfig -a': which interface(s) is/are marked RUNNING? Is DHCPRUNNING set on any of the interfaces? Is an IP address assigned to any of the interfaces?
   1* For a wireless link, the output of 'dladm show-wifi': is the link connected to a WLAN?
   1* The output of 'netstat -rn': do you have a default route?
   1* Are name services set up properly? The typical dhcp-based configuration will include a file called /etc/resolv.conf, which configures DNS for network name resolution; does that file exist, with data entered in it?
    Enabling debugging in NWAM can also help diagnosis. First, /etc/syslog.conf needs to be modified to ensure syslogging captures daemon debug messages. Add a line such as this (note that the syslog.conf fields must be TAB-separated, so if you copy and paste the text from this page, you'll probably need to manually insert a tab before the filename):

daemon.debug	/var/tmp/nwam.log

 followed by

# touch /var/tmp/nwam.log
# svcadm refresh system-log
# svcadm restart system-log

 This tells syslog to dump daemon messages in /var/tmp/nwam.log. Now, enable debugging in NWAM:

# svccfg -s nwam setprop nwamd/debug = true
# svcadm refresh nwam

 To restart and try and reproduce the problem, it may help to run

# svcadm restart nwam

 When contacting nwam-discuss about problems, the debug log will be helpful in diagnosing the issue.