Just spent the last 3 days trying to get a MythTV box setup on Mum’s wireless network. I had everything working at home but when I tried to set it up on Mum’s machine it just wouldn’t connect to the network.

It could connect if I turned wireless security off, and it could see the network when the security was turned on but flat out refused to connect to the network with the WPA and passphrase. It turns out after much angst, upgrading of routers and rebooting of the system, that Ubuntu can’t accept some special characters in the WPA password. Ubuntu has the bug listed in their bug tracker.

I also found the command /etc/init.d/networking restart quite useful as it allows you to see the network reboot interactively and identify any issues that you might have with your /etc/network/interfaces file.