I recently had an issue connecting to a WLAN with my ArchLinux/Systemd/Netctl notebook. While analyzing it, I found a few ways to troubleshoot issues with netctl.

For the following instructions and examples, please note that my wlan interface is called wlp2s0 and may differ on your system. You may get a list of interfaces with the command

$> ip link

Is your profile loaded?

After I copied and adapted one of the profiles from /etc/netctl/examples and tried to switch to it, I got the following error message:

Profile 'wlp2s0-33C3' does not exist or is not available

The problem was that I did not reload netctl-auto. This is how that can be done:

$> sudo systemctl restart netctl-auto@wlp2s0.service

It is usually handy to have the journal log running in a separate console while looking into issues of this sort. When reloading netctl-auto for example, you could have the journal log running with

$> sudo journalctl -xef

If the profile was successfully loaded, you should see the output

Dec 28 13:24:28 asus-rethab netctl-auto[3204]: Included profile 'wlp2s0-33C3'

Issues with the profile?

The ESSID of the network I was trying to connect to was 33C3. For some reason, I forgot to put this into quotes in the netctl profile so it would simply not be activated and keep falling back to some other default profile. I figured this out by instructing netctl to tell me more about what it is doing with the environment variable NETCTL_DEBUG like so:

$> NETCTL_DEBUG=true sudo netctl-auto switch-to wlp2s0-33C3

This way I learned that wpa_cli was trying different networks and eventually seemed to fallback to the default. So I ran wpa_cli manually to see which options it tried:

$> sudo wpa_cli -i wlp2s0 list_networks

This listed me all familiar networks plus one that was named 3\xc3 which lead me to suspect that something with the ESSID must be wrong.