# wlan0 Not Communicating with rtwn.



## Old_School (Feb 23, 2020)

My intention is to have the wifi automatically connect my laptop to my hotspot or, in its absence, to the next strongest available source of wireless. In a GUI on other operating systems, one may readily find a list of available sources to choose from; in FreeBSD, `ifconfig wlan0 up list scan` at least displays the sources.
     My laptop is a 17" Toshiba Satellite L755 with a Realtek wireless chipset. The noble writer of drivers for FreeBSD completed the driver for the particular variety of this chipset last summer. On first implementation four months ago, wireless with a strong signal could be obtained at eighty feet; since then, the distance for the signal has declined to two feet.
    At first, `wifimgr` was used in the GUI, but, since `wifimgr`seems no longer to be maintained, `wifimgr` began crashing the system; so, I deleted it, and have been using the console after boot to bring up the wifi.
    The usual method, `ifconfig wlan0 down`, followed by `ifconfig wlan0 up`, followed by `ifconfig wlan0 up ssid "nameofsource"`, worked for a month, but, in the last month, has become increasingly unreliable.
    A few days ago, I obtained a MiFi8000-1CDE from Sprint, which works well on my other (Windows, spit!) computer, but, although detected on my FreeBSD system, will not associate. The command, of course, is `ifconfig wlan0 up ssid "MiFi8000-1CDE"`.
    I have put this netblock in /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf


```
network={
    ssid="MiFi8000-1CDE"
    scan_ssid=1
    priority=99
    key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
    psk="password"
}
```

at the head of the list, each netblock being separated by a newline. So, I believe that the syntax there is correct.
    Beyond this, I do not know what to do. There seems some kind of dissociation with rtwn at boot. I believe that there is supposed to be some kind of legerdemain going on before wlan0 is created at boot, but I cannot understand the mechanism because the man pages for rtwn and wlan0 are themselves dissociated in so far as I can understand them.
    To repeat, the best of all possible worlds would be for the wireless to be automatically connected on boot to the hotspot, or, in the absence of the hotspot, to the strongest available signal otherwise.


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