Still an intermittent wifi

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Still an intermittent wifi

Postby adhefe » Feb 27th, '20, 03:29

Hi all,

This is more of a complain ...

I have had problems with an intermittent wifi connection on Linux for a long time. No matter if I use Mageia or another distribution, this laptop or a few other ones, this network or some other, wifi intermittently drops out and restart, the number of listed networks available varies from tens to zero.

I've checked the driver used in this (up to date) mageia 7 I use and it seems to be the proper one for my chipset.

So, why my cell phone (and the windows 10) doesn't seem to drop the wifi as often as linux distros I've tried?

It would be really great if someone else know how to overcome this apparently rather widespread problem. Hope it isn't a linux driver problem since it seems the driver used in my case is provided by the chip manufacturer itself.

The only thing it seems consistently correlated to the problem is the wifi signal level, although cell phones and windows seems to manage this where linux doesn't.

Thanks
adhefe
 
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby benmc » Feb 27th, '20, 05:32

Hi

I have the same wifi device and it requires the proprietary drivers to work.
you will need to install:

broadcom-wl-common
dkms-broadcom-wl
kernel-*desktop*-devel-latest (I have the *desktop* kernel, you may have a different one. : server, i586, linus, tmb etc)

you can install from MCC- add software, or from a root terminal (urpmi )
any extra packages / dependencies should be installed automatically

you will need to reboot

regards
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby doktor5000 » Feb 27th, '20, 18:14

benmc wrote:I have the same wifi device

How do you know what wifi device the OP is currently using ?
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby benmc » Feb 27th, '20, 20:08

doktor5000 wrote:How do you know what wifi device the OP is currently using ?


good question.

It appears my reply was for this thread: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=13327
:oops:
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby adhefe » Feb 27th, '20, 23:54

Thank you, Bemmc,

But unfortunately it seems I'm already using the right driver:

Code: Select all
$ lspci| grep -i wireless
00:14.3 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless-AC 9560 [Jefferson Peak] (rev 10)


and,

Code: Select all
$ rpm -qa|grep iwl
iwlwifi-4965-ucode-228.61.2.24-11.mga7.nonfree
iwlwifi-3945-ucode-15.32.2.9-9.mga7.nonfree
iwlwifi-firmware-20191220-1.mga7.nonfree


assuming that
Code: Select all
iwlwifi-firmware-20191220-1.mga7.nonfree
is an update of
Code: Select all
20190114-2
, the link,

https://packages.debian.org/buster/firmware-iwlwifi

says it covers the 9560 intel chip.
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby doktor5000 » Feb 28th, '20, 17:46

Please post the output of
Code: Select all
lspcidrake -v|grep -i net
to show vendor/product ID for your wireless chipset
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby adhefe » Feb 29th, '20, 03:28

Doktor5000, here is the output of this command:

Code: Select all
$ lspcidrake -v|grep  -i net
r8169           : Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.|RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller [NETWORK_ETHERNET] (vendor:10ec device:8168 subv:1d05 subd:1042) (rev: 12)
iwlwifi         : Intel Corporation|Wireless-AC 9560 [Jefferson Peak] [NETWORK_OTHER] (vendor:8086 device:a370 subv:8086 subd:0034) (rev: 10)


I thank any hint on this
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby adhefe » Feb 29th, '20, 03:30

But not only mine isn't the only computer with problems but also I've seen some other posts, in other forums, other distros, reporting similar experience...
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby doktor5000 » Feb 29th, '20, 11:31

Please add some more information on your actual wireless connection and router.
Are you connected via 2.4GHz or 5GHz band? What channel is selected on the router, or is it set to auto-select. What wifi router are you using, and what encryption?
Something that might help is manually selecting a channel, and using 5GHz only, see the link: https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/use ... form_noise
Also try the other way around if you're currently using 5GHz.

Then one by one, try disabling hardware encryption (switch to software encryption), power management, bluetooth coexistence and possibly other module options.
You can view available module options and their settings by doing as root
Code: Select all
modinfo iwlwifi|grep parm:

See some pointers e.g. here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ne ... ss#iwlwifi and here https://blog.kafaiworks.com/posts/archl ... -msi-gp63/ or here https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxadmin/com ... y_on_wifi/

Also please at least add the output as root of
Code: Select all
journalctl -ab|grep -iE "iwlwifi|80211"

so we can see what the iwlwifi module reports to the system log.
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby adhefe » Mar 1st, '20, 03:27

Hi Doktor5000,

The router is an old TP-Link TL-WR941ND, 2.4 to 2.4835 GHz.
The channel is on automatic. It is possible to set 20MHz for the channel in the router's configuration, I did it now to try. I also set the channel as 9.

I'm also posting the output of modinfo and journalctl attached.
Attachments
modinfo_iwlwifi.txt
the output of modinfo iwlwifi|grep parm:
(1.52 KiB) Downloaded 100 times
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby adhefe » Mar 1st, '20, 03:28

The other attachment:
Attachments
journalctl.txt
the output of journalctl -ab|grep -iE "iwlwifi|80211"
(2.67 KiB) Downloaded 100 times
adhefe
 
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby doktor5000 » Mar 1st, '20, 12:11

For the journalctl output, has there been any disconnect or other connection issue during the time in the log?
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby adhefe » Mar 2nd, '20, 01:02

doktor5000 wrote:For the journalctl output, has there been any disconnect or other connection issue during the time in the log?

Not that I could notice.
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby doktor5000 » Mar 2nd, '20, 21:12

Well, you would need to post a log excerpt where you actually had connection issues, and you would need to add some comments on when the connection issues took place.

Otherwise there's not much more that can be advised remotely ...
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby canadaist » Mar 11th, '20, 15:54

Shouldn't this be marked Solved?
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby isadora » Mar 11th, '20, 16:14

Is it?
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby doktor5000 » Mar 11th, '20, 17:59

@canadaist: Why do you think so ? OP never mentioned that the issue is fixed, and from what I understood the connection issues still happen intermittently.
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby adhefe » Mar 12th, '20, 02:39

doktor5000 wrote:and from what I understood the connection issues still happen intermittently.


Yes, connection is still intermittent here. I've made the channel set to 9 and choose 20MHz but no luck.

Maybe I should buy a better rooter ...
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby canadaist » Mar 12th, '20, 19:44

Sorry, I guess I misinterpreted this...

,
has there been any disconnect or other connection issue during the time in the log?


Not that I could notice
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby adhefe » Mar 21st, '20, 04:28

Hoping someone can help me,
I've attached the output of dmesg in a moment when wifi kept going down and up so often as a few seconds...
There one can see "Connection to AP AP 64:66:b3:73:bd:ae lost" many times. Also it is possible to see it gets reconnected a few seconds after ...

Thanks in advance
Attachments
dmesg_wifi.txt
(119.41 KiB) Downloaded 93 times
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby doktor5000 » Mar 21st, '20, 12:35

Which of the suggestions did you test out yet?

doktor5000 wrote:Then one by one, try disabling hardware encryption (switch to software encryption), power management, bluetooth coexistence and possibly other module options.
You can view available module options and their settings by doing as root
Code: Select all
modinfo iwlwifi|grep parm:

See some pointers e.g. here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ne ... ss#iwlwifi and here https://blog.kafaiworks.com/posts/archl ... -msi-gp63/ or here https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxadmin/com ... y_on_wifi/


If you use networkmanager, you could also try the suggestion from https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1599036#c10 to disable PMF.
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby adhefe » Mar 22nd, '20, 00:27

doktor5000 wrote:Then one by one, try disabling hardware encryption (switch to software encryption), power management, bluetooth coexistence and possibly other module options.


Setting software encryption results in no connection at all, changing power management (via power_save), and bluetooth coexistence didn't help;

Changing other parameters will be (as the three above) blind tests since I really don't know what I'm doing. I'll try one by one, but If parameters are to be set in different combinations then the number of tests will be really large ...

Someone, in another forum, changed /etc/sysctl.conf to have the following lines

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 1

and reported the problem was solved. It did not help me also.
By the way, should /etc/sysctl.conf have those lines about IPV4?

doktor5000 wrote:If you use networkmanager


I've used networkmanager in another distro => same problems.

Thanks a lot, anyway ...
adhefe
 
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby doktor5000 » Mar 22nd, '20, 01:44

adhefe wrote:By the way, should /etc/sysctl.conf have those lines about IPV4?

So you want to disable IPv4 ?
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby adhefe » Mar 22nd, '20, 03:24

doktor5000 wrote:So you want to disable IPv4 ?


Is there any risk of any kind if I do this?
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Re: Still an intermittent wifi

Postby doktor5000 » Mar 22nd, '20, 12:16

Well, you will only have IPv6 then. If your ISP doesn't offer a native IPv6 connection, you won't have any internet connection at all.
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