Hi everyone,

I have a IPW5100AGN wireless card, which was %100 OK till yesterday.I was working late and battery ran out.When I powered it up again I started to get these output :
======================================
bash-3.1# ioctl[SIOCSIWAUTH]: Operation not supported
WEXT auth param 4 value 0x0 - ctrl_iface exists and seems to be in use - cannot override it
Delete '/var/run/wpa_supplicant/wlan0' manually if it is not used anymore
Failed to initialize control interface '/var/run/wpa_supplicant'.
You may have another wpa_supplicant process already running or the file was
left by an unclean termination of wpa_supplicant in which case you will need
to manually remove this file before starting wpa_supplicant again.

ioctl[SIOCSIWAUTH]: Operation not supported
WEXT auth param 4 value 0x0 -
[1]+ Exit 255 wpa_supplicant -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
====================================

I was curious and tried shutting down by cutting power to my other laptop with IPW2200BG and guess what, it gave the same outputs when I powered it up too.I removed /var/run/wpa_supplicant but no luck with that.It seems that wpa_supplicant is still running from the first unexpected shutdown.

I do not care about the IPW2200 one but 5100AGN is really important for me.I had set it up by this url; http://www.dkpw.co.uk/wp/?p=465

I rolled back everything I did and did them all over again but nothing changes, it is kinda stuck.

Any suggestions are welcomed.

Cheers!

what happened is there is some stale pid and sockets still there and if you do like it say you will be fine. The reason you have stale pid is that your laptop died it died now. and linux did not have a chace to wipe the the /tmp/ sockets out or delet the running pid.so now when you boot Linux looks at the /var/run pid in there and say it is already there so it cannot create a duplicate. and that is why you cannot get on line or use the card.
pid lock file also look in the /home/username/ I bet you will find a stale lock file.
in slackware it will be if you installed wicd in /var/run/wicd/ pid

This problem can be classified as a design error.Everyone using wpa_supplicant can live this issue if their battery runs out and laptop is not connected to power adapter.

Can reinstalling the OS on the current damaged one solve the problem ?
If there is no solution to this problem I might have to format the system though.