Wi-Fi suddenly disabled in F11

[MuadNu]

My wireless gets randomly disabled in my Acer Timeline 3810 with F11. The time it can take is basically random, but most of the times it ends up happening. I get disconnected, and then in the network manager in gnome panel wireless network appears disables and in fact the option appears grayed out. The only thing I can do to get it back workinh is restart. Any ideas?

[madhavdiwan]

would you mind running the lspci command in a terminal and telling us what wifi card you have in the laptop?

if you want you can also run " yum install lshw lshw-gui " in a terminal as the root user and let us know the wireless chip set that way..

regardless of the chipset .. usually disconnects are caused by , 1) loss of signal
2) loss of packets / frames or interference 3) improper keys , or mac / firewall filtering

Since your set up is not auto reconnecting .. i am guessing that the wifi card is losing all association with the wireless router. you should not have to restart the entire laptop to get back up and running

you might try running ifconfig and iwconfig on the command line after such an incident to see whats is happening on the ip and wireless stacks before rebooting., also try to run the dmesg command in a terminal to see what just happened to your network card when it fails.

you may simply need to restart NetworkManager service . or at worst .. stop NetworkManager, uninstall the wifi card kernel module from memory with modprobe -r , and then reinstall it iwth a modprobe and run NetworkManager again

by the way .. is the network service off on the latop? if you are using NetworkManager for running the wifi card .. you should have the network service off and the NetworkManger service on .. you can do this via the System / Administration / Services menu on your Gnome desktop

[MuadNu]

Thanks for your reply. NetworkManager is on and the network service off. And the issue is not a loss of signal or any of the other possibilities you mention. I lose the wireless in my laptop, I stop being able to use it, it's as if I didn't have a functioning wireless card. By the way, lspci gives "Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless WiFi Link 5100".

Next time it happens I'll try uninstalling the wifi from memory (I've tried already just restarting NetworkManager but that doesn't help). But I'm not sure how to find out the name of the driver to put after 'modprobe -r'.

[madhavdiwan]

lspci -v tell you which kernel module/driver is running your card. look for the "Kernel driver in use" message under your wifi cards listing

dmesg will tell you if there is a driver or kernel error that explains why you are dropping your connection.

you could simply have a bad card .. or a badly installed driver .. or the wrong firmware...., or an old driver that does not work well with your router.

you will not be able to tell unless you do the log file reviews and the dmesg / ifconfig /iwconfig output review.

you can post some of those messages .. not everything please... here to get help interpreting what they say.

Ive kown people who claim their card does not work , when it works perfectly fine , if they tune down the power it is using , too much signal is just as bad as to little. iwconfig should be able to help determine that.

if it IS a bad card .. it s probably a minipci or minicpi-e card and can be replaced in the back of the laptop.

[joe.pelayo]

Just for the record my laptop (running F12 x86_64, and with an Atheros card) is presenting the same problem as MuadNu's. Restarting NetworkManager does not help either. The thing is that the machine didn't have problems before with F11 or with early F12, apparently it is down to some recent update (I am tempted to say "kernel update" because apparently both of our affected wifi cards's support is built in there).

I still have to try that command "modprobe" but meanwhile madhavdiwan, can you please elaborate a little bit on that "signal strength" or power thing? I remember having altered my router's default configuration raising the signal strength (but again the router is very far from the computer), is that related?

Thanks,
Joe.