WiFi restoration

[Ian Malone]

On 25 April 2015 at 11:18, Timothy Murphy <gayleard at eircom.net> wrote:
> Tim wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 2015-04-25 at 01:22 +0200, Timothy Murphy wrote:
>>> Airplane mode? Is there such a thing on a laptop?
>>
>> I would have thought so, people do use laptops when they travel.
>
> I'm running Fedora/KDE, and I don't see anything called "Airplane mode"
> (or Airplane anything) in KNetworkManager.
>

Plasma 5 has an explicit 'airplane' icon next to the switch which you
tick to disable wireless, in KDE4 it's just the enable wireless
checkbox, but does the same thing (except you uncheck it to disable):

With 'enable wireless' ticked:
[root at atlas ~]# rfkill list
0: phy0: Wireless LAN
        Soft blocked: no
        Hard blocked: no

With it unchecked:
[root at atlas ~]# rfkill list
0: phy0: Wireless LAN
        Soft blocked: yes
        Hard blocked: no

On my old Sony laptop there was a slider switch which would toggle
that 'Hard blocked' status. An interesting effect (that I discovered
when the switch became unreliable and I had to use a USB dongle) was
the Hard blocked setting would stop both attached cards running. I
suspect that's handled in networkmanager, as removing the kernel
module for the builtin wifi allowed the USB one to connect okay. On my
new laptop there is a function key which only acts on the 'Soft
blocked' state, in windows it can be configured to act on bluetooth
and wifi or bring up a controller for the different radios on board.

> I'm in the distant room where WiFi sometimes fails - but infrequently -
> and reception is fine at the moment;
> but if WiFi does fail I'll first try turning the "wireless switch" off
> for a few seconds, and then on again.
> I should have thought of that earlier.
>

If restarting the card allows it to reconnect when it gets into the
connection lost state that does somewhat suggest there are accumulated
errors somewhere (in the driver maybe) due to the poor connection that
eventually cause a failure. Increasing the signal by moving the wifi
access point as suggested may help mask that. One other thing you can
do is do a modprobe -r on the kernel module for your device and then a
modprobe to load it again. If it's a problem in the driver triggered
by connection errors then that may clear it.

-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk